quotations about God
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
The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves. The Stoic, the Platonist, and the Epicurean, the Polytheist, the Dualist, and the Trinitarian, differ infinitely in their conceptions of its meaning. They agree only in considering it the most awful and most venerable of names, as a common term devised to express all of mystery, or majesty, or power, which the invisible world contains. And not only has every sect distinct conceptions of the application of this name, but scarcely two individuals of the same sect, who exercise in any degree the freedom of their judgment, or yield themselves with any candour of feeling to the influences of the visible world, find perfect coincidence of opinion to exist between them.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Essay on Christianity"
'Twas only fear first in the world made gods.
BEN JONSON
Sejanus
You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
God appears and god is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Auguries of Innocence
Most sermons sound to me like commercials -- but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
The God of the Old Testament did not distance Himself from His chosen people; He participated in their struggles and made Israel's enemies His own. Israel's own transgressions grieved Him and incited Him to a terrible wrath. Ours is no aloof Lord--no Buddha beyond it all or Zeus making light of mortal travail. Among the world religions Christianity is unique in presenting a suffering God, a God who took human suffering upon Himself and in His agony gave birth to mankind's salvation.
JOHN UPDIKE
In the Beauty of the Lilies
God never made his work for man to mend.
JOHN DRYDEN
Epistle to John Driden of Chesterton, 1700
Where there is most of God, there is least of self.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
If God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty -- by ceasing to exist.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.
GOD
Futurama
God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellect.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
God's commandments are the iron door into himself. To keep them is to have it opened and his great heart of love revealed.
SAMUEL WILLOUGHBY DUFFIELD
Fragments
The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky -- as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment. The big eye was a glutton for great theater. The big eye was indifferent as to whether the Earthling shows were comedy, tragedy, farce, satire, athletics, or vaudeville. Its demand, which Earthlings apparently found as irresistible as gravity, was that the shows be great. The demand was so powerful that Earthlings did almost nothing but perform for it, night and day.... The big eye was the only audience that Earthlings really cared about.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation?
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch 22
I appreciate the idea of allowing people to have their own private walk with God. To me, God is about love, not condemnation.
CLAY AIKEN
Learning to Sing: Hearing the Music in Your Life
God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars--
If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond them
Were that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"The Inhumanist"
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
RICHARD DAWKINS
attributed, The Root of All Evil