quotations about God
No god save self, that is the way to live ...
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the athiest who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
I think, Some shrewd man first, a man in judgment wise,
Found for mortals the fear of gods,
Thereby to frighten the wicked should they
Even act or speak or scheme in secret.
EURIPIDES
Sisyphus (fragment)
He who looks for the worst in men will not be without belief in a personal devil; he who looks for the best in men will not be without faith in a personal God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
The Divinity is so great, and of such a character, that He both sees and hears all things, is omnipotent, and attends to all things at once.
XENOPHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
I don't want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had -- Plato's white grandfatherly god -- because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can't trust him with your kids.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
"The Love Shack", Christianity Today, Mar. 4, 2013
Gods die when they are forgotten.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
I ask no truer image of my Heavenly Father than I find reflected in my own heart -- all loving, all forgiving.
HOSEA BALLOU
Treasury of Thought
God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Power and the Glory
Man creates both his god and his devil in his own image. His god is himself at his best, and his devil himself at his worst.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
God deceiveth thee not.
THOMAS À KEMPIS
Imitation of Christ
And I knew not God to be a Spirit, not one who hath parts extended in length and breadth, or whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole: and if it be infinite, it must be less in such part as is defined by a certain space, than in its infinitude; and so is not wholly every where, as Spirit, as God. And what that should be in us, by which we were like to God, and might be rightly said to be after the image of God, I was altogether ignorant.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Many deeds are enacted in God's name which fill the Devil's heart with envy.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
God, wishing His elect to realize their own misery, often temporarily withdraws His favours: no more is needed to prove to us in a very short time what we really are.
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
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
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"The Threat of Creationism", New York Times Magazine, Jun. 14, 1981
Religion is ... being as much like God as man can be.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms