quotations about God
To recognize God where and as he reveals himself is the only true bliss on earth.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
I think he is condemned by himself to loneliness. God is One: he was, he is, he will be always One. One is so lonely. Maybe that is why he created human beings--to feel less lonely. But as human beings betray his creation, he may become even lonelier.
ELIE WIESEL
Random House interview
Be careful how you talk about God. He's the only God we have. If you let him go he won't come back. He won't even look back over his shoulder. And then what will you do?
HAROLD PINTER
Ashes to Ashes
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
God deceiveth thee not.
THOMAS À KEMPIS
Imitation of Christ
How things stand, is God.
God is, how things stand.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Notebooks, Aug. 1, 1916
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)
To seek God within ourselves avails us far more than to look for Him amongst creatures.
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
It's easy being a god. If you have the right equipment.
DAN SIMMONS
Ilium
Nothing more shows the low condition Man is fallen into, than the unsuitable notion we must have of God, by the ways we take to please him.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
The marvels of God are not brought forth from one's self.
Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played.
The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather,
through the touch of the Musician.
I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God's kindness.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
attributed, Soul Weavings
Mistrusts sometimes come over one's mind of the justice of God. But let a real misery come again, and to whom do we fly? To whom do we instinctively and immediately look up?
B. R. HAYDON
Table Talk
I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.
REBECCA WEST
The Paris Review, spring 1981
All human love is a faint type of God's;
An echoing note from a harmonious whole;
A feeble spark from an undying flame;
A single drop from an unfathomed sea:
But God's is infinite; it fills the earth
And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.
ALBERT LAIGHTON
"The Love of God"
No god save self, that is the way to live ...
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth"
God may be distinguished, but not divided from the World. World without God were an effect without a cause; but God without World were a cause without an effect.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
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
Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a human creature or sought some secret of human science. Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no mysteries.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
God is a wider consciousness than we are, a pure intelligence, spiritual life and actuality. He is neither one nor many, neither man nor spirit. Such predicates belong only to finite beings.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
"Fichte's Conception of God", The Philosophical Review, vol. 4, 1895
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