Selected god quotes

1. 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.

2. Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.

3. God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

4. I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.

5. Jah show every mon him hand, and Jah has show I mine.

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

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

8. What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

9. I believe in the Motherhood of God.

10. 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.

11. I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job.

12. Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.

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

14. 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.

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

16. 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.

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

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

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

20. 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.

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

22. 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.

23. 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.

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

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

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

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

28. 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

35. 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.

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

37. An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.

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

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

40. 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.

41. From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend - Path, motive, guide, original and end.

42. Sunt superis sua iura

43. Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.

44. God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

45. That none deserve eternal bliss I know: Unmerited the grace in mercy given, But none shall sink to everlasting woe That have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven.

46. Perhaps our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create Him.

47. In 'Credo,' an essay published in 1991, Clarke lays out a belief system by distinguishing between two views of God: Alpha, who 'rewards good and evil in some vaguely described afterlife,' and Omega, 'Creator of Everything ... a much more interesting character and not so easily dismissed.' Clarke writes, 'No intelligent person can contemplate the night sky without a sense of awe. The mind-boggling vista of exploding supernovae and hurtling galaxies does seem to require a certain amount of explaining.'

48. Seriously, does it bother anyone else that God might be fuckin' with our heads?! [Mimes digging] 'Ho ho ho! We'll see who believes in me now!'

49. It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

50. I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.

51. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

52. There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'

53. There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'Thy will be done.'

54. 'But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?' ' Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell choose it. ... No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock, it is opened.'

55. [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing - not even a person - but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

56. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

57. God lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.

58. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.

59. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

60. If we cannot 'practice the presence of God,' it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.

61. ''Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?''

62. God writes in exceedingly crooked lines.

63. The universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct, being at least a general attendant of human nature, may be considered as a kind of mark or stamp, which the divine workman has set upon his work; and nothing surely can more dignify mankind, than to be thus selected from all other parts of the creation, and to bear the image or impression of the universal Creator. But consult this image, as it appears in the popular religions of the world. How is the deity disfigured in our representations of him! What caprice, absurdity, and immorality are attributed to him! How much is he degraded even below the character, which we should naturally, in common life, ascribe to a man of sense and virtue!

64. God's power is infinite. Whatever he wills is executed. But neither man, nor any other animal, is happy. Therefore he does not will their happiness. Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is God willing to prevent evil, but unable? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

65. I hear that God has a really bad haircut.

66. This is where I came from, and I thank a merciful God that I am able to return.

67. 'Cause the Roman Gods up to that point were crap, you know... Jeff, the god of biscuits... and Simon, the god of hair-dos.

68. There is one God, in whom there is the Divine Trinity, and he is the Lord Jesus Christ. This can be briefly illustrated in the following way: It is a certain and established truth that God is one, and his essence cannot be divided; and also that there is a Trinity. Since God is One, and his essence cannot be divided, it follows that God is one Person. And since he is one Person, the Trinity is in that Person. It is clear that this Person is the Lord Jesus Christ from the fact that he was conceived from God the Father (Luke 1:34, 35), and thus as to his soul and life itself he is God. Therefore, as he himself said, 'he and the Father are one.' (John 10:30).

69. Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.

70. Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.

71. Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

72. What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

73. The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who 'reduced to absurdity' 'the wisdom of this world' (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah - that is essentially Jewish.

74. The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt, In that fear doubteth thee.

75. As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God...the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.

76. Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.

77. There is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything ... He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.

78. I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

79. The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

80. The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend - and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.

81. Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality. (B 395)

82. Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

83. Is it so big a mystery what god and man and world are? No! but nobody knows how to solve it so the mystery hangs on.

84. Now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

85. The best of it all is, God is with us.

86. A little, wretched, despicable creature; a worm, a mere nothing, and less than nothing; a vile insect that has risen up in contempt against the majesty of Heaven and earth.

87. The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow.

88. Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration, without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriad's of ages hence. Resolved to do whatever I think to be my duty and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general. Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

89. No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.

90. No one has a monopoly of the true God, nor is there a nation or religion that can claim, or at any rate prove, that it has been given the exclusive right to the Creator or sole knowledge of His Being.

91. Kabir says, 'O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath.

92. I felt in need of a great pilgrimage so I sat still for three days and God came to me.

93. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.

94. To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

95. What does it mean to have a god? or, what is God? Answer: A god means that from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress, so that to have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe Him from the [whole] heart; as I have often said that the confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust be right, then is your god also true; and, on the other hand, if your trust be false and wrong, then you have not the true God; for these two belong together faith and God. That now, I say, upon which you set your heart and put your trust is properly your god.

96. A mighty fortress is our God, A bulwark never failing; Our helper He amid the flood Of mortal ills prevailing.

97. Ein' feste burg is unser Gott, ein gute wehr und waffen. Er hilft uns frei aus aller not, die uns itzt hat betroffen.

98. Hath God obliged himself not to exceed the bounds of our knowledge?

99. I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a 'because,' but rather an 'in order to.'

100. Creo en Dios porque creo a Dios.