quotations about God
The nearer the Church the further from God.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Sermon on the Nativity before James I
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
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
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
I have too much respect for the idea of God to hold Him responsible for such an absurd world.
GEORGES DUHAMEL
The Pasquier Chronicles
I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
JULIAN BARNES
Conversations with Julian Barnes
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
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
Who would imagine that the Deity conducts his providence similar to the detestable despots of this world? Oh horrible? most horrible impeachment of Divine Goodness!
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
Socrates and Plato agree that God is that which is one, hath its original from its own self, is of a singular subsistence, is one only being perfectly good; all these various names signifying goodness do all centre in mind; hence God is to be understood as that mind and intellect, which is a separate idea, that is to say, pure and unmixed of all matter, and not mingled with anything subject to passions.
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
O thou mighty mind! whose powerful word
Said, thus let all things be, and thus they were!
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
"A Summer Evening's Meditation"
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
You cannot know God until you've stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking you've already heard God.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
The eternal Being is forever if he is at all.
BLAISE PASCAL
Thoughts
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
God's universe is not like the American legal system. You do something, you pay for it.
THE DEVIL
Brimstone
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
Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Enoch Arden
A bad God is worse than no God at all.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish