quotations about God
All nations believe the gods to be governed by a king; for men, who have made the gods after their own image, are ever hasty in ascribing to these celestial beings, human manners and human institutions.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
I have too much respect for the idea of God to hold Him responsible for such an absurd world.
GEORGES DUHAMEL
The Pasquier Chronicles
It is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the proper closest statement of it that can be made in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the Sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God's thoughts.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun, earth, and sky; of the oceans and rivers; of rain and thunderstorms; even of earthquakes and volcanoes. When the gods were pleased, mankind was treated to good weather, peace, and freedom from natural disaster and disease. When they were displeased, there came draught, war, pestilence, and epidemics. Since the connection of cause and effect in nature was invisible to their eyes, these gods appeared inscrutable, and people at their mercy.
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW
The Grand Design
I have been in the Place of the Gods and seen it! Now slay me, if it is the law -- but still I know they were men.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
By the Waters of Babylon
There's something infinitely sad about little girls who grow up understanding (usually unconsciously) that if God is male, it's because male is the most valuable thing to be. This belief resonates in a thousand hidden ways in their lives. It slowly cripples girl children, and it cripples female adults.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
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
Nature only shows us the tail of the lion. I am convinced, however, that the lion is attached to it, even though he cannot reveal himself directly because of his enormous size.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
O thou mighty mind! whose powerful word
Said, thus let all things be, and thus they were!
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
"A Summer Evening's Meditation"
The eternal Being is forever if he is at all.
BLAISE PASCAL
Thoughts
If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
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
I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
JULIAN BARNES
Conversations with Julian Barnes
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 appears as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
Who would imagine that the Deity conducts his providence similar to the detestable despots of this world? Oh horrible? most horrible impeachment of Divine Goodness!
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
It should not be so hard to believe in God, for man himself is scarcely less wonderful.
FRANK CRANE
"The Part of Me That Doubts", Four Minute Essays
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
A bad God is worse than no God at all.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
I now conceive of God as in his universe. I conceive of creation as a growth. I conceive of him as making the universe somewhat as our spirit makes our body, shaping and changing and developing it by processes from within. The figures from the finite to the infinite are imperfect and misleading, but this is the figure which best represents to me my own thought of God's relation to the universe: Not that of an engineer who said one morning, " Go to, I will make a world," and in six days, or six thousand years, or six million thousand years, made one by forming it from without, as a potter forms the clay with skilful hand; but that of a Spirit who has been forever manifesting himself in the works of creation and beneficence in all the universe, one little work of whose wisdom and beneficence we are and we see. He who would see God must use the faculty with which God is seen; and if he would do this, he must let men who are rich in the faculty which perceives the invisible, -- which looks not at the things which are seen and are temporal, but at the things which are not seen and are eternal, -- guide, teach, inspire him.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God