quotations about God
When the gods know that a god hath fallen,
With this kindly feeling
They do encourage him--
Be thou a god again and again.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
PLATO
The Republic
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World as I See it
God never made his work for man to mend.
JOHN DRYDEN
Epistle to John Driden of Chesterton, 1700
If you're sincerely seeking God, God will make His existence evident to you.
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG
God?: A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist
As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
Man
Where there is most of God, there is least of self.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Gods must be seen to be omnipotent, or the sky will fall.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires
The ethical is the universal, and as such it is again the divine. One has therefore a right to say that fundamentally every duty is a duty toward God; but if one cannot say more, then one affirms at the same time that properly I have no duty toward God. Duty becomes duty by being referred to God, but in duty itself I do not come into relation with God. Thus it is a duty to love one's neighbor, but in performing this duty I do not come into relation with God but with the neighbor whom I love. If I say then in this connection that it is my duty to love God, I am really uttering only a tautology, inasmuch as "God" is in this instance used in an entirely abstract sense as the divine, i.e. the universal, i.e. duty. So the whole existence of the human race is rounded off completely like a sphere, and the ethical is at once its limit and its content. God becomes an invisible vanishing point, a powerless thought, His power being only in the ethical which is the content of existence.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Fear and Trembling
God's commandments are the iron door into himself. To keep them is to have it opened and his great heart of love revealed.
SAMUEL WILLOUGHBY DUFFIELD
Fragments
'Twas only fear first in the world made gods.
BEN JONSON
Sejanus
There exists an infinite, eternal Being, subsisting of himself, who is one without being alone; for he finds in his own essence relations whence, with the necessary movement of his life, results the absolute plenitude of his perfection and his happiness. A Being unique and complete, God suffices to himself.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
God and Man: Conferences Delivered at Notre Dame in Paris by the Rev. Père Lacordaire
My God is in the hearts of those that seek Him ... And in my heart I carry an assurance of His love that life cannot disturb. I know His love as the babe knows its mother's love, lying upon her breast. It knows her love though it neither understands her nature nor her ways.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
God Himself is simple, and employs simple men to shape the world.
JOHN UPDIKE
Terrorist
God gives as the wheat gives: we sow one grain, and reap a hundred.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world -- of all living things.
The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.
JOHN STEINBECK
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dec. 10, 1962
God sinks into dust before man.
MAX STIRNER
The Ego and Its Own
If the ox could think, it would attribute oxality to God.
XENOCRATES
attributed, Personality: The Beginning and End of Metaphysics
I think he is condemned by himself to loneliness. God is One: he was, he is, he will be always One. One is so lonely. Maybe that is why he created human beings--to feel less lonely. But as human beings betray his creation, he may become even lonelier.
ELIE WIESEL
Random House interview