quotations about God
Now I think I know why gods
Are so partial to heights--to mountain
Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees
And thorn-guarded holy bombax,
Why petty household divinities
Will sooner perch on a rude board
Strung precariously from brittle rafters
Of a thatched roof
than sit squarely
On safe earth.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
Let nothing disturb thee,
Let nothing affright thee;
All passeth away:
God only shall stay.
Patience wins all:
Who hath God, needeth nothing;
For God is his All.
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Exclamations of the Soul to God
In the face of nature's overwhelming forces, humans needed a God who would protect them from harm. When they felt that they had broken the law or committed wrongdoing, people turned to a God who would judge them on the one hand and redeem their sins on the other. In this way, purely from slef-interest, the project of creating God in our own image proceeded--and continues to proceed.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
How to Know God
I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me -- I actually took my teachers seriously!
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Elmer Gantry
We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
It is too frequent to begin with God and end with the World. But He is the good man's Beginning and End; his Alpha and Omega.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
God is only a great imaginative experience.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence
Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Gods Will Have Blood
People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
JAMES BALDWIN
address delivered at Kalamazoo College, February 1960
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation?
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch 22
I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
ELIE WIESEL
The Paris Review, spring 1984
It is highly convenient to believe in the infinite mercy of God when you feel the need of mercy, but remember also his infinite justice.
B. R. HAYDON
Table Talk
I appreciate the idea of allowing people to have their own private walk with God. To me, God is about love, not condemnation.
CLAY AIKEN
Learning to Sing: Hearing the Music in Your Life
All ways are byeways but the way of God,
So broad, not thought a road.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Universal Hymn
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
RICHARD DAWKINS
attributed, The Root of All Evil
The God of the Old Testament did not distance Himself from His chosen people; He participated in their struggles and made Israel's enemies His own. Israel's own transgressions grieved Him and incited Him to a terrible wrath. Ours is no aloof Lord--no Buddha beyond it all or Zeus making light of mortal travail. Among the world religions Christianity is unique in presenting a suffering God, a God who took human suffering upon Himself and in His agony gave birth to mankind's salvation.
JOHN UPDIKE
In the Beauty of the Lilies
Gradually my whole conception of the relation of God to the universe has changed. I am sure that I have not lost my experience of God. I am far more certain now than I was forty years ago that God is, and that God is not an absentee God. I am not quite so certain as I once was about some of the manifestations which I once thought he had made of himself. I am a great deal more certain than I once was of his personal relation to me. My experience of God has changed only to grow deeper, broader, and stronger. But my conception of God's relation to the universe has changed radically. My hypothesis was -- God an engineer who had made an engine and sat apart from it, ruling it; God a king who had made the human race and sat apart from men, ruling them. That was my hypothesis; now I have another hypothesis. And I think the change which has come over my mind is coming and has come over the minds of a great many. I think that there is nothing original in what I am going to say to you this morning, for I am only going to interpret to you a change, perhaps not altogether understood, which is being wrought in the mind of the whole Christian Church. I think my change only reflects your change. But whether that be true or not, I am sure the change has taken place in me.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
God is not only fatherly,
God is also mother
who lifts her loved child
from the ground to her knee.
The Trinity is like a mother's cloak
wherein the child finds a home
and lays its head on the maternal breast.
MECHTILD OF MAGDEBURG
attributed, Soul Weavings