quotations about God
The rule of God is not tyranny, for it does not partake of a political or governmental character -- it is not a rule of authority. God is not a governor of the universe, for a governor rules over those of a like nature with himself, and exercises a political and judicial power, while God exercises a creative, a preserving, and a determinative power of an altogether different kind. If I am a servant of God, I am under no tyranny; for God does not govern, but supports, sustains, and directs me.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
Remarks on the Science of History
There's only one response God's got to anything you might care to tell Him--that your brother's dying of AIDS, for example, and that you'd really appreciate it if He could help out with a bit of the old razzle-dazzle--and that response is: Yeah, I know.
GLEN DUNCAN
I
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
Many people choose to believe that God communicates in special ways and only with special people. This removes the mass of the people from responsibility for hearing My message, much less receiving it (which is another matter), and allows them to take someone else's word for everything. You don't have to listen to Me, for you've already decided that others have heard from Me on every subject, and you have them to listen to.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
The divine qualities of man are but the slightest hints, the faintest intimations, of the attributes of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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
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
If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
In reality, each thought we have carries with it a little spiritual power, a tug toward or away from God. No thought is purely neutral.
JOHN ORTBERG
God Is Closer Than You Think
It makes a great deal of difference what sort of God men believe in.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.
J. L. MACKIE
Evil and Omnipotence
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
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
If there is a God what the hell is He for?
WILLIAM FAULKNER
As I Lay Dying
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
Since ancient times, the philosophers' secret has always been this: we know that God does not exist, or, at least, if he does, he's utterly indifferent to our individual affairs--but we can't let the rabble know that; it's the fear of God, the threat of divine punishment and the promise of divine reward, that keeps in line those too unsophisticated to work out questions of morality on their own.
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Calculating God
These are thy glorious works Parent of Good,
Almighty, thine this universal Frame,
Thus wondrous fair; thy self how wondrous then!
Unspeakable, who sitst above these Heavens
To us invisible or dimly seen
In these thy lowest works, yet these declare
Thy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine:
Speak ye who best can tell, ye Sons of light,
Angels, for ye behold him, and with songs
And choral symphonies, Day without Night,
Circle his Throne rejoicing, ye in Heav'n,
On Earth join all ye Creatures to extoll
Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost