quotations about God
God is a witness that cannot be sworn.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Watt
I don't want to start
Any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's
Got a sick sense of humour
And when I die
I expect to find Him laughing
DEPECHE MODE
"Blasphemous Rumours"
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sep. 28, 1949
If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Religion and Science
It makes a great deal of difference what sort of God men believe in.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
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
The brave-speaking Plato pronounceth that God formed the world after his own image; but this smells rank of the old dotages, old comic writers would say; for how did God, casting his eye upon himself, frame this universe? Or how can God be spherical, and be inferior to man?
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
God is the explanation of all things.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
NORMAN MAILER
"Advertisement for Myself on the Way Out," Advertisements for Myself
Many deeds are enacted in God's name which fill the Devil's heart with envy.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.
GLEN COOK
Dreams of Steel
Books were the sustenance of God. And His munitions.
RéGIS DEBRAY
God: An Itinerary
Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other Gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Does God exist?", Salon, October 2, 2011
I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me, "Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian beaver cheese is equally valid"-then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
American Atheist Magazine, winter 1998-1999
It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook A", Aphorisms
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
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Book of Job: An Introduction"
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"The Threat of Creationism", New York Times Magazine, Jun. 14, 1981
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Tell My Horse