quotations about God
God's merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Note-Books
We seem to think that God speaks by seconding the ideas we've already adopted, but God nearly always catches us by surprise. If it's God's Spirit blowing, someone ends up having feathers ruffled in an unforeseen way. God tends to confound, astonish, and flabbergast.
SUE MONK KIDD
When the Heart Waits
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
WILLIAM JAMES
Lecture XX, "Conclusions," The Varieties of Religious Experience
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
The divine qualities of man are but the slightest hints, the faintest intimations, of the attributes of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God has no religion.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
I'm never tempted by God but I like his trappings.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
If the consciousness of God is possible to all healthful souls, why are so many men and women without this consciousness? There are men and women, not a few, who do not want God. They would be very glad to have God if he were always on their side; glad to have God if he would always do what they want him to do. But a supreme will, a masterful will, a will to which they must conform, they do not want.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
I love God's shadow better than man's light.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Thoughts," The Writings of Madame Swetchine
God--the force, the energy, the design, the experience that some call Divinity--shows itself in your life in the way that is exactly and perfectly suited to the time, place, and situation at hand. You either call that experience "God" or you call it something else--coincidence, synchronicity, "random event," whatever. Yet what you call it does not change what it is--it merely indicates your belief system.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Tomorrow's God
Who knoweth God the sum of science owns.
The heavens record His handiwork; the earth
Worships His footsteps; life His breath repeats;
The soul His image; everlasting space,
The harmonies of His nature echoing, round
Reflects His vast extension; the great whole,
His boundless being, and His infinite mind.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Universal Hymn
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
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Docker
God is able to do more than man can understand.
THOMAS À KEMPIS
Imitation of Christ
Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
attributed, The Best Liberal Quotes Ever
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
The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.
ARISTOPHANES
The Clouds
Those who are crafty, think the wisdom of God warrants him to deceive; those who are revengeful, think the goodness of God permits him to be cruel; those who are arbitrary, think the sovereignty of God is the account of his actions. Everyone attributes to God, what he finds in himself: but that cannot be a perfection in God, which is a dishonesty in Man.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
No god save self, that is the way to live ...
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
Let a man reverence himself. Then he is not far from believing in God.
FRANK CRANE
"The Part of Me That Doubts", Four Minute Essays