GOD QUOTES XXI

quotations about God

Since ancient times, the philosophers' secret has always been this: we know that God does not exist, or, at least, if he does, he's utterly indifferent to our individual affairs--but we can't let the rabble know that; it's the fear of God, the threat of divine punishment and the promise of divine reward, that keeps in line those too unsophisticated to work out questions of morality on their own.

ROBERT J. SAWYER

Calculating God

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Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.

T. S. ELIOT

The Rock


Try to comprehend the unity of all; there is one God, and all are one in Him. If we can but bring home to ourselves the unity of that Eternal Love, there will be no more sorrow for us; for we shall realize, not for ourselves alone but for those whom we love, that whether we live or die, we are the Lord's, and that in Him we live and move and have our being, whether it be in this world or in the world to come.

C. W. LEADBEATER

The Science of the Sacraments


God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Fusées

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Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

The Crossing


The life of God -- the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things -- may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

The Phenomenology of Spirit


God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.

GRAHAM GREENE

The Power and the Glory


The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the athiest who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

MARCEL PROUST

The Guermantes Way


For the existence of any religion there must be a belief that there is, somewhere in the universe, an intelligence of a higher order than man's, and that this intelligence possesses a power superior to what we call the ordinary powers of nature. And religion is simply the condition or adjustment of the relations between each individual human soul and that higher intelligence, call it by what name you will.

ROSSITER JOHNSON

"The Whispering Gallery"


Many deeds are enacted in God's name which fill the Devil's heart with envy.

ABRAHAM MILLER

Unmoral Maxims


Mistrusts sometimes come over one's mind of the justice of God. But let a real misery come again, and to whom do we fly? To whom do we instinctively and immediately look up?

B. R. HAYDON

Table Talk


Man creates both his god and his devil in his own image. His god is himself at his best, and his devil himself at his worst.

ELBERT HUBBARD

The American Bible


The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

EMMA GOLDMAN

"The Philosophy of Atheism," Mother Jones, Feb. 1916


The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

G. K. CHESTERTON

"The Book of Job: An Introduction"

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I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.

GEORGE ELIOT

Adam Bede


It makes a great deal of difference what sort of God men believe in.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.

J. L. MACKIE

Evil and Omnipotence

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To say that the Great Companion is dead, is not to say that there is no God. The dead also live; but between them and ourselves all communion and companionship seem to most of us impossible. So to many in our own time, to many without the Church, to some within it, living companionship with a living God is an experience unknown. They believe in what Carlyle calls a "hypothetical God," but he is to them only a hypothesis. They look back through the ages for some evidence of a God who revealed himself centuries ago; they look forward with anticipation to a God who will reveal himself in some future ephiphany; but of a God here and now, a God who is a perpetual presence, a God whom they can see as Abraham saw him, with whom they can talk as Moses talked with him, who will inspire them with courage as he inspired Gideon, with hope as he inspired Isaiah, and with praise as he inspired David, they do not know.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Great Companion


Man from his own existence knows the existence of a Creator; from his own attributes, he knows the attributes of his maker; from the control which he has over his own kingdom, he knows the control that God exercises over all the world.

MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI

The Alchemy of Happiness


God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

SAMUEL BECKETT

Watt

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