GOD QUOTES V
quotations about God
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The different ideas which men form of God (whilst the scripture character of him is overlooked), result from the various dispositions and propensities which they derive from constitution, education, and habit. The voluptuary will imagine with a certain dissolute monarch (Charles II), that God will not damn a man for taking "a little pleasure in an irregular manner;" nor can the ambitious warrior or covetous oppressor be convinced that the supreme Being will demand a strict account of all the blood shed, or the injustice committed, in their respective pursuits: a speculating philosopher may imagine a deity too dignified to notice the conduct, or too clement to punish the crimes, of puny mortals; at least he will deem him very favorable to the self-wise, and such as are superior to vulgar prejudices, whatever he may do in respect to debauchees and sanguinary tyrants. Thus men's ideas of God are framed according to their own prevailing propensities; and then those ideas of him reciprocally tend to form their characters, and influence their conduct, both in respect of religious duties and in the common concerns of life.
THOMAS SCOTT
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"On the Scripture Character of God", Essays on the Most Important Subjects in Religion
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Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
J.B.S. HALDANE
Possible Worlds and Other Papers
A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.
EMILE ZOLA
Truth
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
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries. Our conception of God being derived from ourselves and the objects affecting us, we can form no idea except one made up of materials furnished by our experience and reflection. Therefore we select whatever powers and qualities we find amongst ourselves, and consider to be most commendable; we separate them from everything gross, material and imperfect, and heighten them to the utmost imaginable pitch; the aggregate of all these makes up our first rational conception of God.
SABINE-BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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"
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
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
He who in God lives, liveth evermore.
DINAH CRAIK
"Living: After a Death"
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
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
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the bulk, so are we soul and body clad and enclosed in the goodness of God: yea, and more homelie, for all they vanish and waste away, the goodness of God is ever whole and more near to us without any comparison.
JULIAN OF NORWICH
Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love
Don't you know there ain't no devil? There's only God when He's drunk.
TOM WAITS
"Heartattack and Vine"
To live in God is death; to die in God is life.
LABOULAYE
Abdallah
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
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 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
God is to be believed in so far as he speaks of his gun.
ANNE CARSON
Decreation
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