GOD QUOTES IV
quotations about God
Each person is entitled to some version of God that seems real, yet many versions contradict one another. The God of any religion is only a fragment of God. This has to be true, because a being who is unbounded has no image, no role to play, no location either inside or outside the cosmos, whereas religions offer many images--father, mother, lawgiver, judge, ruler of the universe.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
How to Know God
Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us
O'er the world's tempestuous sea;
Guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us,
For we have no help but Thee.
JAMES EDMESTON
Lead Us
It is your organized religions that have made it clear through their most sacred scriptures that cruelty and killing is an acceptable response to human frailty and human differences. This goes against every human instinct, but organized religion has reorganized human thoughts. Some humans have even been turned against their own instinct for survival. And so people go around maiming and killing each other, because they've been told quite directly that this is what God does to them--and what God wants them to do to each other.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
The New Revelations: A Conversation with God
If, it was natural to reason, God punishes men with eternal torment, it is surely lawful for men to use doses of it in a good cause.
JOSEPH MCCABE
A History of Torture
Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
London Calling, 1947
God's mouth knows not how to speak falsehood, but he brings to pass every word.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
GAO XINGJIAN
The Other Shore
I have found God, but he is insufficient.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
All powers, all laws, are but the fair
Embodied thoughts of God.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
All things are full of God
I don't understand worshipping a god who denigrates women and whose 'true believers' feel it's their right to look down on anyone who doesn't think exactly as they do.
P.C. CAST & KRISTIN CAST
Chosen
Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.
J. M. COETZEE
Elizabeth Costello
Are we to believe that God peculiarly dwells in temples made with hands--he who is a spirit, and occupies all space; that he needs articulated prayers--he who knows our thoughts before they are framed with words; that sprinklings and washings, that bread and wine, that mediation of trained priests--in short, that religion as a ritual, something in itself and for itself, with its own times, seasons, customs, and feelings, is acceptable to him or necessary to us? Away with such husks of form, such superstitions of the world's childhood! Let religion henceforth be a life; and life a religion. Let the heart, the conscience, the intellect, worship God and serve man, and the bondage of rites and times and symbols and external sanctities wholly disappear.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
God is constantly better than his promise. He does not limit Himself by our expectations.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.
JOHN LENNON
statement to reporters at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, August 11, 1966
If God is the greatest possible being, a maximally perfect source of existence, then he is not just one more item in the inventory of reality. He is the hub of the wheel, the center and focus, the ultimate support, of all.
THOMAS V. MORRIS
Our Idea of God
I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts.
MARQUIS DE SADE
Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue
God is alpha and omega in the great world: endeavor to make him so in the little world; make him thy evening epilogue and thy morning prologue; practice to make him thy last thought at night when thou sleepest, and thy first thought in the morning when thou awakest; so shall thy fancy be sanctified in the night, and thy understanding rectified in the day; so shall thy rest be peaceful, thy labors prosperous, thy life pious, and thy death glorious.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Enchiridion
If you can make God bleed, then people will cease to believe in him.
WHIPLASH
Iron Man 2
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
J.B.S. HALDANE
Possible Worlds and Other Papers
God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
ROBERT BROWNING
Paracelsus