quotations about God
We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
God is to be believed in so far as he speaks of his gun.
ANNE CARSON
Decreation
This letter has become a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels, scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. Why do I not call for help, call to God? Because God cannot help me. God is looking for me but he cannot reach me. God is another dog in another maze. I smell God and God smells me. I am the bitch in her time, God the male. God smells me, he can think of nothing else but finding me and taking me. Up and down the branches he bounds, scratching at the mesh. But he is lost as I am lost.
J. M. COETZEE
Age of Iron
When God makes his presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was--he only saw the brightness of the lord.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
God, possessing supreme and infinite wisdom, acts in the most perfect manner, not only metaphysically, but also morally speaking, and ... with respect to ourselves, we can say that the more enlightened and informed we are about God's works, the more we will be disposed to find them excellent and in complete conformity with what we might have desired.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
Discourse on Metaphysics
Our life is like th' unstable wave,
Our bloom of youth decays.
Our joys are brief as lightning flash
In summer's cloudy days,
Our riches fleet as swift as thought;
Faith in the One Supreme
Alone will bear us o'er the gulfs
Of Being's stormy stream.
BHARTRHARI
"Of Time the Destroyer"
Don't you know there ain't no devil? There's only God when He's drunk.
TOM WAITS
"Heartattack and Vine"
Though cares and sorrows e'er must come,
Though heart be rent,
I know that God will give me strength,
When mine is spent.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"The Peace That Passeth Understanding"
No man will find God unless he seeks after God for God's own sake, loves him for himself, and not for the gifts which he may bestow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Soul of the universe, Sire, God, Creator,
Lord, I believe in Thee, 'neath all these names:
And without having need to hear thy word,
In the sky's brow my glorious creed I trace.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
SRI AUROBINDO
Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol
A bad God is worse than no God at all.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering.... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection.
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Calculating God
God is a thought which makes crooked all that is straight.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spake Zarathustra
God's nature is medicinal to ours. There are no troubles which befall our suffering hearts, for which there is not in God a remedy, if only we rise to receive it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
TIMOTHY LEARY
The Intelligence Agents
I'm not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.
STEPHEN HAWKING
New Scientist, Apr. 26, 2007
It should not be so hard to believe in God, for man himself is scarcely less wonderful.
FRANK CRANE
"The Part of Me That Doubts", Four Minute Essays
The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Evolutionary Agents