quotations about God
We can no more exist without a surrounding God, than a tree can exist without a surrounding atmosphere.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
lecture, Nov. 18, 1862
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
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's nature is medicinal to ours. There are no troubles which befall our suffering hearts, for which there is not in God a remedy, if only we rise to receive it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God's image is in every man, high or low--a road puddle holds the moon as well as the sea.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The most radical thing about a conversion to God is the determination to love, to really love in His name.
ANNE RICE
The Wolves of Midwinter
I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.
ANNE CARSON
The Paris Review, fall 2004
As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
"Does God exist?", Salon, October 2, 2011
In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
meditation on the will of God, Sep. 1862
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
When we say that God is infinite, we do not mean that He is of immeasurable size and duration, but that He is beyond all space and time. He is neither in space nor in time; for this reason He is eternal and infinite, and therefore He is also incomprehensible.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering.... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection.
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Calculating God
You cannot know God until you've stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking you've already heard God.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness -- a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
No man will find God unless he seeks after God for God's own sake, loves him for himself, and not for the gifts which he may bestow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
To know the face of God is to know madness.
LEOBEN CONOY
"Flesh and Bone", Battlestar Galactica
The nearer the Church the further from God.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Sermon on the Nativity before James I
We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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