quotations about God
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
There's something infinitely sad about little girls who grow up understanding (usually unconsciously) that if God is male, it's because male is the most valuable thing to be. This belief resonates in a thousand hidden ways in their lives. It slowly cripples girl children, and it cripples female adults.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
God's universe is not like the American legal system. You do something, you pay for it.
THE DEVIL
Brimstone
Nature only shows us the tail of the lion. I am convinced, however, that the lion is attached to it, even though he cannot reveal himself directly because of his enormous size.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
Before we deny or believe the existence of anything, it is necessary that we should have a tolerably clear idea of what it is. The word "God," a vague word, has been, and will continue to be, the source of numberless errors, until it is erased from the nomenclature of philosophy. Does it imply "the soul of the universe, the intelligent and necessarily beneficent, actuating principle?" This it is impossible not to believe in; I may not be able to adduce proofs, but I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are, in themselves, arguments more conclusive than any which can be advanced, that some vast intellect animates infinity.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Jan. 3, 1811
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
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
I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith -- it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
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"
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
The best notion we can conceive of God, may be, that he is to the creation what the soul is to the body.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.
ANNE CARSON
The Paris Review, fall 2004
We can no more exist without a surrounding God, than a tree can exist without a surrounding atmosphere.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
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
The most radical thing about a conversion to God is the determination to love, to really love in His name.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophical Writings of Annie Besant
A bad God is worse than no God at all.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
God does not accept me conditionally, on the basis of my performance, but bestows his love and forgiveness freely, despite my innumerable failures.
PHILIP YANCEY
Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?
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
Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun, earth, and sky; of the oceans and rivers; of rain and thunderstorms; even of earthquakes and volcanoes. When the gods were pleased, mankind was treated to good weather, peace, and freedom from natural disaster and disease. When they were displeased, there came draught, war, pestilence, and epidemics. Since the connection of cause and effect in nature was invisible to their eyes, these gods appeared inscrutable, and people at their mercy.
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW
The Grand Design