quotations about God
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
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
We can no more exist without a surrounding God, than a tree can exist without a surrounding atmosphere.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
God Himself has no right to be a tyrant.
WILLIAM GODWIN
Sketches of History
However many years life might last, no one could ever wish for a better friend than God.
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
The nearer the Church the further from God.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
Sermon on the Nativity before James I
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
To know the face of God is to know madness.
LEOBEN CONOY
"Flesh and Bone", Battlestar Galactica
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
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
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 has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring--it is his will that we should love.
VICTOR HUGO
Toilers of the Sea
God is a thought which makes crooked all that is straight.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Socrates and Plato agree that God is that which is one, hath its original from its own self, is of a singular subsistence, is one only being perfectly good; all these various names signifying goodness do all centre in mind; hence God is to be understood as that mind and intellect, which is a separate idea, that is to say, pure and unmixed of all matter, and not mingled with anything subject to passions.
PLUTARCH
"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies
We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
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 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
Soul of the universe, Sire, God, Creator,
Lord, I believe in Thee, 'neath all these names:
And without having need to hear thy word,
In the sky's brow my glorious creed I trace.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion