quotations about God
The best notion we can conceive of God, may be, that he is to the creation what the soul is to the body.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
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
All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of him but in broken and imperfect words. High above all he sits, sublimer than mountains, grander than storms, sweeter than blossoms and tender fruits, nobler than lords, truer than parents, more loving than lovers. His feet tread the lowest places of the earth; but his head is above all glory, and everywhere he is supreme.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
God's whole nature moves toward the man who wants to be free from sin, as broadly and irresistibly as the summer moves from the south toward the north.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We can no more exist without a surrounding God, than a tree can exist without a surrounding atmosphere.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you -- even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
The Stoics affirm that God is a thing more common and obvious, and is a mechanic fire which every way spreads itself to produce the world; it contains in itself all seminal virtues, and by this means all things by a fatal necessity were produced. This spirit, passing through the whole world, received different names from the mutations in the matter through which it ran in its journey. God therefore is the world, the stars, the earth, and (highest of all) the mind in the heavens. In the judgment of Epicurus all the gods are anthropomorphites, or have the shape of men; but they are perceptible only by reason, for their nature admits of no other manner of being apprehended, their parts being so small and fine that they give no corporeal representations. The same Epicurus asserts that there are four other natural beings which are immortal: of this sort are atoms, the vacuum, the infinite, and the similar parts; and these last are called Homoeomeries and likewise elements.
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
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
When men make gods, there is no God!
EUGENE O'NEILL
Lazarus Laughed
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
God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring--it is his will that we should love.
VICTOR HUGO
Toilers of the Sea
However many years life might last, no one could ever wish for a better friend than God.
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
God's universe is not like the American legal system. You do something, you pay for it.
THE DEVIL
Brimstone
Socrates and Plato agree that God is that which is one, hath its original from its own self, is of a singular subsistence, is one only being perfectly good; all these various names signifying goodness do all centre in mind; hence God is to be understood as that mind and intellect, which is a separate idea, that is to say, pure and unmixed of all matter, and not mingled with anything subject to passions.
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
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
Giving yourself up o love is melting into God. It is falling into the hands of the living God with complete abandon. This is the deep, interior prayer for which we have been striving. Here we must let go of our dependency on thoughts, words, and images. We go into the beautiful darkness. We stop struggling. We let the angels carry us. Surrender is the only word we know.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
A Tree Full of Angels
I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
JULIAN BARNES
Conversations with Julian Barnes
The nearer the Church the further from God.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Sermon on the Nativity before James I
I have, I think, somewhat of an odd version of God. I do not have an intervening Go I appreciate other people's prayers for that [a cure for her cancer], but I believe that we are given a set of guidelines, and that we are obligated to live our lives with a view to those guidelines. And I don't believe that we should live our lives that way for some promise of eternal life, but because that's what's right. We should do those things because that's what's right.
ELIZABETH EDWARDS
attributed, Politics Daily, Dec. 8, 2010
If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion