GOD QUOTES VII

quotations about God

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

Tags: Plutarch


However many years life might last, no one could ever wish for a better friend than God.

TERESA OF AVILA

The Interior Castle

Tags: Teresa of Avila


I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

History of Woman Suffrage


All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of him but in broken and imperfect words. High above all he sits, sublimer than mountains, grander than storms, sweeter than blossoms and tender fruits, nobler than lords, truer than parents, more loving than lovers. His feet tread the lowest places of the earth; but his head is above all glory, and everywhere he is supreme.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Life Thoughts


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


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


The God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

The Life of Reason


Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.

CHARLES DARWIN

The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin


I now conceive of God as in his universe. I conceive of creation as a growth. I conceive of him as making the universe somewhat as our spirit makes our body, shaping and changing and developing it by processes from within. The figures from the finite to the infinite are imperfect and misleading, but this is the figure which best represents to me my own thought of God's relation to the universe: Not that of an engineer who said one morning, " Go to, I will make a world," and in six days, or six thousand years, or six million thousand years, made one by forming it from without, as a potter forms the clay with skilful hand; but that of a Spirit who has been forever manifesting himself in the works of creation and beneficence in all the universe, one little work of whose wisdom and beneficence we are and we see. He who would see God must use the faculty with which God is seen; and if he would do this, he must let men who are rich in the faculty which perceives the invisible, -- which looks not at the things which are seen and are temporal, but at the things which are not seen and are eternal, -- guide, teach, inspire him.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Seeking After God

Tags: Lyman Abbott


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


All nations believe the gods to be governed by a king; for men, who have made the gods after their own image, are ever hasty in ascribing to these celestial beings, human manners and human institutions.

ARISTOTLE

Politics


God's universe is not like the American legal system. You do something, you pay for it.

THE DEVIL

Brimstone


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

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The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

lecture, Nov. 18, 1862


The existence of the world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.

ARMAND SALACROU

attributed, Certitudes et Incertitudes


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


If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion


To know the face of God is to know madness.

LEOBEN CONOY

"Flesh and Bone", Battlestar Galactica


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

Tags: Sabine Baring-Gould


What were a God who only gave the world a push from without, or let it spin around His finger? I look for a God who moves the world from within, who fosters nature in Himself, Himself in nature; so that naught of all that lives and moves and has its being in Him ever forgets His force or His spirit.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

"Phoœmion"

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe