quotations about God
You are as close to God in your own sitting room as in the basilica; but the basilica has worth if it strengthens your faith.
SIMON MAWER
The Gospel of Judas
God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night. But the night is limitless, and the Divine struggle will never cease.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
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?
The gods of men are sillier than their kings and queens, and emptier and more powerless.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Elizabeth the Queen
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
God is infinite and we are finite; and, at the best, we can only know him a very little.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home.
JOSEPH ROUX
Meditations of a Parish Priest
We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world -- of all living things.
The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.
JOHN STEINBECK
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dec. 10, 1962
In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.
JOHN ORTBERG
God Is Closer Than You Think
To recognize God where and as he reveals himself is the only true bliss on earth.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Only one thing is necessary: to possess God -- All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Twilight of the Idols
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
No god save self, that is the way to live ...
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
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
The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.
ARISTOPHANES
The Clouds
I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
WILLIAM JAMES
Lecture III, "Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered," Pragmatism
I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.
REBECCA WEST
The Paris Review, spring 1981