quotations about God
Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Gods Will Have Blood
Now I think I know why gods
Are so partial to heights--to mountain
Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees
And thorn-guarded holy bombax,
Why petty household divinities
Will sooner perch on a rude board
Strung precariously from brittle rafters
Of a thatched roof
than sit squarely
On safe earth.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
He who trusts in the word of God knows that he will find nothing in the material universe but the will of God.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
In the face of nature's overwhelming forces, humans needed a God who would protect them from harm. When they felt that they had broken the law or committed wrongdoing, people turned to a God who would judge them on the one hand and redeem their sins on the other. In this way, purely from slef-interest, the project of creating God in our own image proceeded--and continues to proceed.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
How to Know God
Let nothing disturb thee,
Let nothing affright thee;
All passeth away:
God only shall stay.
Patience wins all:
Who hath God, needeth nothing;
For God is his All.
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Exclamations of the Soul to God
All ways are byeways but the way of God,
So broad, not thought a road.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Universal Hymn
I can't bring myself to believe in a God with a personality like my own. I base that on the paucity of lightning attacks on people who deserve it.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics
What a wonderfully small idea mankind has of the Almighty. My impression is that he has made unchangeable laws to govern this and billions of other worlds and that he has forgotten even the existence of this little mote of ours ages ago.
THOMAS EDISON
diary entry, Jul. 21, 1885
It is highly convenient to believe in the infinite mercy of God when you feel the need of mercy, but remember also his infinite justice.
B. R. HAYDON
Table Talk
Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
No man or woman can truly choose to serve God unless they are equally free to refuse to serve Him, and God desires for His people to come to Him clear-eyed and joyously, not cringing in terror of the Inquisition and the damnation of Hell.
DAVID WEBER
By Schism Rent Asunder
The prerogative of God extendeth as well to the reason as to the will of man: so that as we are to obey His law, though we find a reluctation in our will, so we are to believe His word, though we find a reluctation in our reason.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
It is too frequent to begin with God and end with the World. But He is the good man's Beginning and End; his Alpha and Omega.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
God is only a great imaginative experience.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence
I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me -- I actually took my teachers seriously!
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Elmer Gantry
People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom
The way to God is by our selves.
PHINEAS FLETCHER
The Purple Island
God -- if he really exist -- is good, alive, self-conscious, and governs all things according to his benevolent and holy providence; but the world shows no indications of such a benevolent and holy Providence. This earth appears to be a hell, or at best a planet condemned -- a sort of purgatory: it is filled with violence, tyranny and injustice, and yet God, if he exist, is absolute sovereign, and has willed that things should be as they are! -- Therefore there is no God.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
Remarks on the Science of History