quotations about God
God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
ROBERT BROWNING
Paracelsus
We recognize the action of God in great things: we exclude it in small. We forget that the Lord of eternity is also the Lord of the hour.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Thoughts," The Writings of Madame Swetchine
And almost every one when age,
Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like Him.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
Dipsychus
To live in God is death; to die in God is life.
LABOULAYE
Abdallah
All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
He who in God lives, liveth evermore.
DINAH CRAIK
"Living: After a Death"
Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
When God makes his presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was--he only saw the brightness of the lord.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conjunctions, Fall 1991
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.
EMILE ZOLA
Truth
There is a God and He is good, and his love, while free, has a self imposed cost: We must be good to one another.
GEORGE H.W. BUSH
RNC acceptance speech, August 18, 1988
This letter has become a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels, scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. Why do I not call for help, call to God? Because God cannot help me. God is looking for me but he cannot reach me. God is another dog in another maze. I smell God and God smells me. I am the bitch in her time, God the male. God smells me, he can think of nothing else but finding me and taking me. Up and down the branches he bounds, scratching at the mesh. But he is lost as I am lost.
J. M. COETZEE
Age of Iron
Though cares and sorrows e'er must come,
Though heart be rent,
I know that God will give me strength,
When mine is spent.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"The Peace That Passeth Understanding"
I want to tell you about the God that actually showed up and healed my heart. Not the God I grew up, because the God I grew up was fundamentally, and I use the word advisedly, fundamentally untrustworthy -- schizophrenic, narcissistic, unreachable, unknowable, and my concept within which I grew up was that Jesus -- He likes me -- but He came to save me from God the Father -- who was the one who was angry and distant, and unreachable, unknowable. All of that had to come crashing down.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
interview, "Your Daily Bread", Rare, Dec. 10, Rare, Dec. 10, 2013
The prerogative of God extendeth as well to the reason as to the will of man: so that as we are to obey His law, though we find a reluctation in our will, so we are to believe His word, though we find a reluctation in our reason.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Our life is like th' unstable wave,
Our bloom of youth decays.
Our joys are brief as lightning flash
In summer's cloudy days,
Our riches fleet as swift as thought;
Faith in the One Supreme
Alone will bear us o'er the gulfs
Of Being's stormy stream.
BHARTRHARI
"Of Time the Destroyer"
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word "darkness" on the walls of his cell.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
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