quotations about God
When men make gods, there is no God!
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
History of Woman Suffrage
The Stoics affirm that God is a thing more common and obvious, and is a mechanic fire which every way spreads itself to produce the world; it contains in itself all seminal virtues, and by this means all things by a fatal necessity were produced. This spirit, passing through the whole world, received different names from the mutations in the matter through which it ran in its journey. God therefore is the world, the stars, the earth, and (highest of all) the mind in the heavens. In the judgment of Epicurus all the gods are anthropomorphites, or have the shape of men; but they are perceptible only by reason, for their nature admits of no other manner of being apprehended, their parts being so small and fine that they give no corporeal representations. The same Epicurus asserts that there are four other natural beings which are immortal: of this sort are atoms, the vacuum, the infinite, and the similar parts; and these last are called Homoeomeries and likewise elements.
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
I have been in the Place of the Gods and seen it! Now slay me, if it is the law -- but still I know they were men.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
By the Waters of Babylon
What were a God who only gave the world a push from without, or let it spin around His finger? I look for a God who moves the world from within, who fosters nature in Himself, Himself in nature; so that naught of all that lives and moves and has its being in Him ever forgets His force or His spirit.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
"Phoœmion"
In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
meditation on the will of God, Sep. 1862
God is a thought which makes crooked all that is straight.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The eternal Being is forever if he is at all.
BLAISE PASCAL
Thoughts
The difference between the truth of God and revelation is very simple. Truth is where God's been. Revelation is where God is. Truth is God's tracks. It's His trail, His path, but it leads to what? It leads to Him. Perhaps the masses of people are happy to know where God's been, but true God chasers are not content just to study God's trail, His truths; they want to know Him. They want to know where He is and what He's doing right now.
TOMMY TENNEY
The God Chasers
It is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the proper closest statement of it that can be made in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the Sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God's thoughts.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
All nations believe the gods to be governed by a king; for men, who have made the gods after their own image, are ever hasty in ascribing to these celestial beings, human manners and human institutions.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
God is the place of spirits, as spaces are the places of bodies.
JOHN LOCKE
"An Examination of P. Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing All Things in God", Philosophical Works
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
I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.
WILHELM REICH
Listen
God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Go Down
Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Enoch Arden
God appears as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
We can no more exist without a surrounding God, than a tree can exist without a surrounding atmosphere.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
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 soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
lecture, Nov. 18, 1862