437 God Quotes

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

This is the gospel of labour, ring it, ye bells of the kirk! The Lord of Love came down from above, to live with the men who work. This is the rose that He planted, here in the thorn-curst soil: Heaven is blest with perfect rest, but the blessing of Earth is toil.

People are too apt to treat God as if he were a minor royalty.

Love, who is most beautiful among the immortal gods, the melter of limbs, overwhelms in their hearts the intelligence and wise counsel of all gods and all men.

Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.

God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.

So God stepped over to the edge of the world And He spat out the seven seas; He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed; He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled; And the waters above the earth came down, The cooling waters came down.

With his head in his hands, God thought and thought, Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image.

Everything I have said or done is in the hands of God. I commit myself to Him! I certify to you that I would do or say nothing against the Christian faith.

Prayer opens the heart to God, and it is the means by which the soul, though empty, is filled by God.

Have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern god of sea.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.

Christ was a Jew, and God, he is supposed to have made the universe. That's a little far-fetched because if God made the world, who made God?

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

The truth is that God is the force. He is the essence of life. He is pure and undefiled consciousness. He is eternal.

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

Are we alone in an uncaring universe, or is God some kind of wiseguy?

If God can be found through the medium of any drug, God is not worthy of being God.

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.

Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man.

God is not the author of all things, but of good only.

Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes.

In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.

Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself.

Above the mists on Hatheg-Kla, earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of clouds and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.

They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from my own, as it was at twenty-five; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica - HYPNOS.

Out in deep space the planets sweep, inexorable, along their splendid orbits. Maxine bowed her head. From now on she would take the gods' dictation.

The will of Zeus was accomplished.

So they spoke, and both springing down from behind their horses gripped each other's hands and exchanged the promise of friendship; but Zeus the son of Kronos stole away the wits of Glaukos who exchanged with Diomedes the son of Tydeus armour of gold for bronze, for nine oxen's worth the worth of a hundred.

These things surely lie on the knees of the gods.

As far as I recall, it's a question of the total dissolution of all notions of an other-worldly salvation. During those years this was going on in me all the time and being replaced by a sense of the holiness - to put it clumsily - to be found in man himself. The only holiness which really exists. A holiness wholly of this world. And I suppose that's what the final sequence tries to express. The notion of love as the only thinkable form of holiness. At the same time another line of development in my idea of God begins here, one that has perhaps grown stronger over the years. The idea of the Christian God as something destructive and fantastically dangerous, something filled with risk for the human being and bringing out in him dark destructive forces instead of the opposite.

Fellow-citizens: Clouds and darkness are around Him; His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds; justice and judgment are the establishment of His throne; mercy and truth shall go before His face! Fellow citizens! God reigns and the Government at Washington lives.

And God smiled again, And the rainbow appeared, And curled itself around his shoulder.

I came from God. There is nothing more for me to do here! Send me back to God, from Whom I came!

My Voices did come from God and everything that I have done was by God's order.

Jehanne... If you come from God, I do not fear you ... if you come from the Devil, I fear you even less.

'Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.

As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye.

Peor and Baalim Forsake their temples dim.

When the soul, then, in any degree possesses the spirit of solitary love, we must not interfere with it. We should inflict a grievous wrong upon it, and upon the Church also, if we were to occupy it, were it only for a moment, in exterior or active duties, however important they might be. When God Himself adjures all not to waken it from its love, who shall venture to do so, and be blameless? In a word, it is for this love that we are all created. Let those men of zeal, who think by their preaching and exterior works to convert the world, consider that they would be much more edifying to the Church, and more pleasing unto God - setting aside the good example they would give if they would spend at least one half their time in prayer, even though they may have not attained to the state of unitive love.

'We Christians joyfully recognize the religious values we have in common with Islam. Today I would like to repeat what I said to young Muslims some years ago in Casablanca: 'We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who created the world and brings his creatures to their perfection.''

Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway.

He [God] owes me an apology too- at the very least. I'm not saying I shouldn't have been punished for those sins I committed. I'm saying that the punishments he chose were inhuman. I wonder what favor I'd want. I think I may be afraid to ask for it. I'm afraid He won't grant it. I'm more afraid that He will. Wouldn't it be tragic to find out that He really has been here all this time?

I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?

God is a murderer, imagine that. I told you I had the best story in the Bible, didn't I? I have always known that He was. Sooner or later He murders us all, doesn't He, and we go back to the dust from which we came. So I'm no longer scared to defy him. All He can do is kill me.

Who and from where are you Dionysus? Since by the true Bacchus, I do not recognize you; I know only the son of Zeus. While he smells like nectar, you smell like a goat. Can it be then that the Celts because of lack of grapes Made you from cereals? Therefore one should call you Demetrius, not Dionysus, rather wheat born and Bromus, Not Bromius.

'That was the strength of the Nazis,' she said. 'They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make him stay away.'

Because He is all-powerful, must all-good, too, follow? I judge but by the fruits-and they are bitter- Which I must feed on for a fault not mine.

Truth is God. (In the meaning truth is absolute, therefore God.)

This freedom from all attachment is the realisation of God as Truth.

Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.

Success is not one of the names of God.

It is better to deny God, than to defy God.

Every word is an Ark of the Covenant around which we dance and shudder, divining God to be its dreadful inhabitant. You shall never be able to establish in words that you live in ecstasy. But struggle unceasingly to establish it in words. Battle with myths, with comparisons, with allegories, with rare and common words, with exclamations and rhymes, to embody it in flesh, to transfix it! God, the Great Ecstatic, works in the same way. He speaks and struggles to speak in every way He can, with seas and with fires, with colors, with wings, with horns, with claws, with constellations and butterflies, that he may establish His ecstasy. Like every other living thing, I also am in the center of the Cosmic whirlpool.

God confronts me with terror and love - for I am His only hope - and says: 'This Ecstatic, who gives birth to all things, who rejoices in them all and yet destroys them, this Ecstatic is my Son!'

My God and I are horsemen galloping in the burning sun or under drizzling rain. Pale, starving, but unsubdued, we ride and converse. 'Leader!' I cry. He turns his face toward me, and I shudder to confront his anguish. Our love for each other is rough and ready, we sit at the same table, we drink the same wine in this low tavern of life.

Humanity is such a lump of mud, each one of us is such a lump of mud. What is our duty? To struggle so that a small flower may blossom from the dunghill of our flesh and mind. Out of things and flesh, out of hunger, out of fear, out of virtue and sin, struggle continually to create God.

All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind's power. It is not the resplendent robe which arrays the mystic body of God. Nor the obscurely translucent partition between man and mystery. All this world that we see, hear, and touch is that accessible to the human senses, a condensation of the two enormous powers of the Universe permeated with all of God.

Even the most humble insect and the most insignificant idea are the military encampments of God. Within them, all of God is arranged in fighting position for a critical battle. Even in the most meaningless particle of earth and sky I hear God crying out: 'Help me!' Everything is an egg in which God's sperm labors without rest, ceaselessly. Innumerable forces within and without it range themselves to defend it. With the light of the brain, with the flame of the heart, I besiege every cell where God is jailed, seeking, trying, hammering to open a gate in the fortress of matter, to create a gap through which God may issue in heroic attack.

We do not only free God by battling and subduing the visible world about us; we also create God. 'Open your eyes,' God shouts; 'I want to see! Prick up your ears, I want to hear! March in the front ranks: you are my head!'

The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh. They spawn and are dismembered. They fill sea, land, and air with species of plants, animals, men, and spirits. This primordial pair embraces, is dismembered, and multiplies in every living creature. All the concentrated agony of the Universe bursts out in every living thing. God is imperiled in the sweet ecstasy and bitterness of flesh. But he shakes himself free, he leaps out of brains and loins, then clings to new brains and new loins until the struggle for liberation again breaks out from the beginning.

Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man.

What games was god playing with her life?

You would turn away one who comes teaching the name of god? The wicked can use god's name as well as god How can we ever know, then, unless we try them? Or should we cast away all men who use the name of god, for fear they're blasphemers? What name will god use, then?

Who are you, god? You decide who's supposed to live and how?

Then the omnipotent Father with his thunder made Olympus tremble, and from Ossa hurled Pelion.

Whosoever is free from the contamination of luxury and licence, may go forth to the fields and to the woods, inhaling joyous renovation from the breath of Spring, or catching from the odours and sounds of Autumn some diviner mood of sweetest sadness, which improves the softened heart. Whosoever is no deceiver or destroyer of his fellow men - no liar, no flatterer, no murderer may walk among his species, deriving, from the communion with all which they contain of beautiful or of majestic, some intercourse with the Universal God. Whosoever has maintained with his own heart the strictest correspondence of confidence, who dares to examine and to estimate every imagination which suggests itself to his mind - whosoever is that which he designs to become, and only aspires to that which the divinity of his own nature shall consider and approve - he has already seen God.

This much is certain, that Jesus Christ represents God as the fountain of all goodness, the eternal enemy of pain and evil, the uniform and unchanging motive of the salutary operations of the material world.

Tell God not to go away. I'll be back in a minute.

The gods are not magicians who transform themselves; neither do they deceive mankind in any way.

Man is not entirely an animal. He aspires to a spiritual vision, which is the vision of the whole truth. This gives him the highest delight, because it reveals to him the deepest harmony that exists between him and his surroundings. It is our desires that limit the scope of our self-realisation, hinder our extension of consciousness, and give rise to sin, which is the innermost barrier that keeps us apart from our God, setting up disunion and the arrogance of exclusiveness. For sin is not one mere action, but it is an attitude of life which takes for granted that our goal is finite, that our self is the ultimate truth, and that we are not all essentially one but exist each for his own separate individual existence.

If I say that He is within me, the universe is ashamed; if I say that He is without me, it is falsehood.

It is our desires that limit the scope of our self-realisation, hinder our extension of consciousness, and give rise to sin, which is the innermost barrier that keeps us apart from our God, setting up disunion and arrogance of exclusiveness. For sin is not one mere action, but it is an attitude of life which takes for granted that our goal is finite, that our self is the ultimate truth, and that we are not all essentially one but exist each for his own separate individual existence.

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time - life and death - stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.

You were planned for God's pleasure.

He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God Making commandments: this is the God who does not care and will never cease. Look at the seas there Flashing against this rock in the darkness - look at the tide-stream stars - and the fall of nations - and dawn Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty. The great explosion is probably only a metaphor - I know not - of faceless violence, the root of all things.

God needeth not the help of a material sword of steel to assist the sword of the Spirit in the affairs of conscience.

Fear nothing, when God is with you, all things are with you.

We trust in God and fear nothing.

He who has God with him fears nothing save His Might.

It is because of my wretchedness that I am 'I.' It is on account of the wretchedness of the universe that, in a sense, God is 'I' (that is to say a person). [p.83]