quotations about God
Whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
To say that the Great Companion is dead, is not to say that there is no God. The dead also live; but between them and ourselves all communion and companionship seem to most of us impossible. So to many in our own time, to many without the Church, to some within it, living companionship with a living God is an experience unknown. They believe in what Carlyle calls a "hypothetical God," but he is to them only a hypothesis. They look back through the ages for some evidence of a God who revealed himself centuries ago; they look forward with anticipation to a God who will reveal himself in some future ephiphany; but of a God here and now, a God who is a perpetual presence, a God whom they can see as Abraham saw him, with whom they can talk as Moses talked with him, who will inspire them with courage as he inspired Gideon, with hope as he inspired Isaiah, and with praise as he inspired David, they do not know.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
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
The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.
God is the ground, the substance,
the teaching, the teacher,
the purpose, and the reward for which every soul labors.
JULIAN OF NORWICH
Meditations with Julian of Norwich
What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.
J. L. MACKIE
Evil and Omnipotence
God is like us to this extent, that whatever in us is good is like God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
The brave-speaking Plato pronounceth that God formed the world after his own image; but this smells rank of the old dotages, old comic writers would say; for how did God, casting his eye upon himself, frame this universe? Or how can God be spherical, and be inferior to man?
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.
GLEN COOK
Dreams of Steel
Man from his own existence knows the existence of a Creator; from his own attributes, he knows the attributes of his maker; from the control which he has over his own kingdom, he knows the control that God exercises over all the world.
MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI
The Alchemy of Happiness
Nothing is trivial to God which is of consequence to us. He is not so absorbed with the affairs of state that he can give no time or thought to the minor concerns of his children's life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
He that trusts in the Lord with all his heart, does not indeed expect, that God will do that for him which he has never promised; far less that he will be favorable unto him, in what is contrary to his revealed will. But, first, he sees that his matters are good and right; and then he commits the keeping of his soul unto the faithful creator; who is a buckler to them alone that walked uprightly. If he is called of God to any difficult duty, for which he finds himself unequal, he persuades himself that God will command his strength, and work in him both to will and to do of his good pleasure; and out of weakness he is made strong.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
"On Trusting God", Select Essays Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
There's only one response God's got to anything you might care to tell Him--that your brother's dying of AIDS, for example, and that you'd really appreciate it if He could help out with a bit of the old razzle-dazzle--and that response is: Yeah, I know.
GLEN DUNCAN
I
We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU
Lettres Persannes