quotations about God
God is a thought which makes crooked all that is straight.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Evolutionary Agents
I'm not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.
STEPHEN HAWKING
New Scientist, Apr. 26, 2007
God is the place of spirits, as spaces are the places of bodies.
JOHN LOCKE
"An Examination of P. Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing All Things in God", Philosophical Works
The best notion we can conceive of God, may be, that he is to the creation what the soul is to the body.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
A bad God is worse than no God at all.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
God appears as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
God's universe is not like the American legal system. You do something, you pay for it.
THE DEVIL
Brimstone
We can no more exist without a surrounding God, than a tree can exist without a surrounding atmosphere.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
The Stoics affirm that God is a thing more common and obvious, and is a mechanic fire which every way spreads itself to produce the world; it contains in itself all seminal virtues, and by this means all things by a fatal necessity were produced. This spirit, passing through the whole world, received different names from the mutations in the matter through which it ran in its journey. God therefore is the world, the stars, the earth, and (highest of all) the mind in the heavens. In the judgment of Epicurus all the gods are anthropomorphites, or have the shape of men; but they are perceptible only by reason, for their nature admits of no other manner of being apprehended, their parts being so small and fine that they give no corporeal representations. The same Epicurus asserts that there are four other natural beings which are immortal: of this sort are atoms, the vacuum, the infinite, and the similar parts; and these last are called Homoeomeries and likewise elements.
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
There is no particular way that God wants you to worship God. Nor, in fact, does God need to be worshipped at all. God's ego is not so fragile that She must require you to bow down to Her in fearful reverence, or grovel before Him in earnest supplication, in order to find you worthy of receiving blessings. What kind of Supreme Being would need to do this? What kind of God would this be?
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
The New Revelations: A Conversation with God
The eternal Being is forever if he is at all.
BLAISE PASCAL
Thoughts
I have too much respect for the idea of God to hold Him responsible for such an absurd world.
GEORGES DUHAMEL
The Pasquier Chronicles
The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
lecture, Nov. 18, 1862
God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Go Down
Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Enoch Arden
God's nature is medicinal to ours. There are no troubles which befall our suffering hearts, for which there is not in God a remedy, if only we rise to receive it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.
WILHELM REICH
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