quotations about God
I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"Queen of the Black Coast," Weird Tales (1933)
The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves. The Stoic, the Platonist, and the Epicurean, the Polytheist, the Dualist, and the Trinitarian, differ infinitely in their conceptions of its meaning. They agree only in considering it the most awful and most venerable of names, as a common term devised to express all of mystery, or majesty, or power, which the invisible world contains. And not only has every sect distinct conceptions of the application of this name, but scarcely two individuals of the same sect, who exercise in any degree the freedom of their judgment, or yield themselves with any candour of feeling to the influences of the visible world, find perfect coincidence of opinion to exist between them.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Essay on Christianity"
He that lives in love lives in God.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
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
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
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
O Eternal God, now may it please you
to burn in love
so that we become the limbs
fashioned in the love you felt
when you begot your Son
at the first dawn
before all creation.
And consider this need which falls upon us,
take it from us for the sake of your Son,
and lead us to the joy of your salvation.
HILDEGARD OF BINDEN
"O eterne deus"
Wherever you have seen God pass, mark that spot, and go and sit in that window again.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I'm trying to get far away from [picturing God as] Gandalf or Santa Claus.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
"The Love Shack", Christianity Today, Mar. 4, Christianity Today, Mar. 4, 2013
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
As the innermost Essence of God is self-existence, so the cosmos (by which we mean everything not-God) is essentially dependent on God as its first and sole cause. The universe is no ens a se; it is entirely ab alio. This dependency is co-existent with the universe in all its phases. From the moment of its creation down to the hour of its consummation the universe is and remains essentially ens ab alio. It depends on God for its being and operation, and would sink back into nothingness without Him.
JOSEPH POHLE
God: The Author of Nature and the Supernatural
God gives as the wheat gives: we sow one grain, and reap a hundred.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
He who trusts in the word of God knows that he will find nothing in the material universe but the will of God.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
God, whom the wisest men acknowledge to be a power uneffable, and virtue infinite; a light by abundant clarity invisible; an understanding which itself can only comprehend; an essence eternal and spiritual, of absolute pureness and simplicity; was and is pleased to make himself known by the work of the world: in the wonderful magnitude whereof, (all which he embraceth, filleth, and sustaineth,) we behold the image of that glory which cannot be measured, and withal, that one, and yet universal nature which cannot be defined. In the glorious lights of heaven we perceive a shadow of his divine countenance.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
The First Part of the History of the World: Intreating of the Beginning and First Ages of the Same
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
I think everyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.
MICHAEL CRICHTON
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Those who know God know that it is quite a mistake to suppose that there are only five senses.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod, the Root, and the Flower
People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom