GOD QUOTES XIX

quotations about God

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


I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

WILLIAM JAMES

Lecture III, "Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered," Pragmatism


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


There is no servant like God. No other being so humbles himself, and so bows down under weakness, and so lifts up with his strength, as God in the plenary service of Love.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


The universe is just as great and amazing inside of me as outside. Immanuel Kant marveled when he looked into his own heart, as when he looked up at the sky. So the stars over me are no less sublime than my soul which mirrors them; thunder and lightning among the clouds are matched by storms of passion within me as terrible as they; my memory is a greater thing than the British Museum, for it is a living museum; my will is greater than gravitation or electricity or gunpowder, for it can use them, and they cannot budge; my imagination is more wondrous than the Vatican gallery, for its pictures come and go with instant swiftness, and my conscience is as mysterious and as majestic as the substance of God Himself.

FRANK CRANE

"The Part of Me That Doubts", Four Minute Essays

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All human love is a faint type of God's;
An echoing note from a harmonious whole;
A feeble spark from an undying flame;
A single drop from an unfathomed sea:
But God's is infinite; it fills the earth
And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.

ALBERT LAIGHTON

"The Love of God"

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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

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God is the only lover and He loves in different forms -- parents, husband, wife, friend, children, animals. All are His forms and He, Himself, has no form.

BABA HARI DASS

Silence Speaks: from the chalkboard of Baba Hari Dass


The name of God should no longer come from the mouth of man. This word that has so long been degraded by usage no longer means anything.... To use the word God is more than sloth, it is a refusal to think, a king of short cut, a hideous shorthand.

ARTHUR ADAMOV

The Confession


The longer I live and the more I see
Of the struggle of souls toward the heights above,
The stronger this truth comes home to me:
That the Universe rests on the shoulders of love;
A love so limitless, deep, and broad,
That men have renamed it and called it--God.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Deathless"


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

ABRAHAM MILLER

Unmoral Maxims


Men may tire themselves in a labyrinth of search, and talk of God: But if we would know him indeed, it must be from the impressions we receive of him; and the softer our hearts are, the deeper and livelier those will be upon us.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude


Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less.

SIMON MAWER

The Gospel of Judas


I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

telegram response to New York rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, Apr. 24, 1929


God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

EMIL CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born


Everyone who believes in God carries around a basic assumption of how God acts in relation with us. The French novelist Flaubert said that a great writer should stand in his novel like God in his creation: nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard. God is everywhere and yet invisible, silent, seemingly absent and indifferent. A few intellectuals may enjoy worshiping such an absentee God, but most Christians prefer Jesus' image of a God as a loving father. We need more than a watchmaker who winds up the universe and lets it tick. We need love and mercy and forgiveness and grace -- qualities only a personal God can offer.

PHILIP YANCEY

Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?


God, so to speak, is myriad-minded. We cannot look, therefore, to put ourselves in accord with his plans any more than any one man can run a line for a railroad which it requires a small army to survey.

SAMUEL WILLOUGHBY DUFFIELD

Fragments

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The word "God" is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness -- a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Literature and Dogma

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God can be good and terrible--not in succession--but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe.

PHILIP K. DICK

Valis


God is Alpha and Omega in the great world, let us endeavour to make him so in the little world; let us practice to make him our last thought at night when we sleep; and our first in the morning when we awake; so shall our fancy be sanctified in the night, and our understanding rectified in the day; so shall our rest be peaceful, and our labours prosperous; our life pious, and our death glorious.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine