quotations about God
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
He who looks for the worst in men will not be without belief in a personal devil; he who looks for the best in men will not be without faith in a personal God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
Let every man come to God in his own way.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
I wouldn't wanna do anything to hurt God. He's got enough trouble with the Russians and all.
THEODORE "BEAVER" CLEAVER
Leave it to Beaver
The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities to be impressed with it.
JAMES MADISON
letter to Frederick Beasley, Nov. 20, 1825
I ask no truer image of my Heavenly Father than I find reflected in my own heart -- all loving, all forgiving.
HOSEA BALLOU
Treasury of Thought
I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, "Man, if that's not a definition of God, I don't know what is."
ALAN ARKIN
Esquire, Mar. 2007
The Divinity is so great, and of such a character, that He both sees and hears all things, is omnipotent, and attends to all things at once.
XENOPHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
H. L. MENCKEN
Minority Report
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
It's easy being a god. If you have the right equipment.
DAN SIMMONS
Ilium
God, wishing His elect to realize their own misery, often temporarily withdraws His favours: no more is needed to prove to us in a very short time what we really are.
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
For the existence of any religion there must be a belief that there is, somewhere in the universe, an intelligence of a higher order than man's, and that this intelligence possesses a power superior to what we call the ordinary powers of nature. And religion is simply the condition or adjustment of the relations between each individual human soul and that higher intelligence, call it by what name you will.
ROSSITER JOHNSON
"The Whispering Gallery"
I think, Some shrewd man first, a man in judgment wise,
Found for mortals the fear of gods,
Thereby to frighten the wicked should they
Even act or speak or scheme in secret.
EURIPIDES
Sisyphus (fragment)
Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
Within you lies embedded in the marble of your human life the Spirit that is God, hidden beneath the flesh, hidden beneath the bodies, the emotions and the mind, so that it is not visible to the outer eyes. You have not to create that image. It is there. You have not to manufacture it; you have only to set it free.
ANNIE BESANT
There Is No Death
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
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