quotations about God
I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me, "Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian beaver cheese is equally valid"-then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
American Atheist Magazine, winter 1998-1999
I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, "Man, if that's not a definition of God, I don't know what is."
ALAN ARKIN
Esquire, Mar. 2007
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
Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other Gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Does God exist?", Salon, October 2, 2011
God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Fusées
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sep. 28, 1949
I wouldn't wanna do anything to hurt God. He's got enough trouble with the Russians and all.
THEODORE "BEAVER" CLEAVER
Leave it to Beaver
It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook A", Aphorisms
Our notions of God are tinged by our own characters and ignorance.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
People, especially young people, don't have enough God in their lives.
PRINCE
"Inside Prince's bizarre life at Paisley Park: This is what happened when we visited the music icon", The Mirror, April 21, 2016
The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"The Philosophy of Atheism," Mother Jones, Feb. 1916
The life of God -- the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things -- may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Those who marry God can become domesticated too--it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves--it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.
GRAHAM GREENE
A Burnt-Out Case
But if God was in a continual vigilance, either there was something wanting to make him happy, or else his beatitude was perfectly complete; but according to neither of these can God be said to be blessed; not according to the first, for if there be any deficiency there is no perfect bliss; not according to the second, for, if there be nothing wanting to the felicity of God, it must be a needless enterprise for him to busy himself in human affairs. And how can it be supposed that God administers by his own providence human concerns, when to vain and trifling persons prosperous things happen, to great and high adverse?
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn't give a shit.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis
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
God is the explanation of all things.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Isn't it time now for us to declare that the emperor is wearing no clothes? When are we going to admit that we believe in a God of extraordinary contradictions, who we say loves and who we say kills, who we say creates and who we say destroys, who we say accepts and who we say rejects, who we say rewards and who we say punishes, who we say brings us good and who we say visits evil upon us, who we say is the All in All and who we say is separate from everything, who we say is Everywhere Present and who we say is not in us and that we are not?
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Tomorrow's God
My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning, and may be many; but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women