GOD QUOTES V
quotations about God
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
God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
ROBERT BROWNING
Paracelsus
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
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
He who in God lives, liveth evermore.
DINAH CRAIK
"Living: After a Death"
To live in God is death; to die in God is life.
LABOULAYE
Abdallah
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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'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
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
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
We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God, possessing supreme and infinite wisdom, acts in the most perfect manner, not only metaphysically, but also morally speaking, and ... with respect to ourselves, we can say that the more enlightened and informed we are about God's works, the more we will be disposed to find them excellent and in complete conformity with what we might have desired.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
Discourse on Metaphysics