GOD QUOTES XVIII

quotations about God

God is infinite and we are finite; and, at the best, we can only know him a very little.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Seeking After God

Tags: Lyman Abbott


God is a wider consciousness than we are, a pure intelligence, spiritual life and actuality. He is neither one nor many, neither man nor spirit. Such predicates belong only to finite beings.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

"Fichte's Conception of God", The Philosophical Review, vol. 4, 1895


Nothing more shows the low condition Man is fallen into, than the unsuitable notion we must have of God, by the ways we take to please him.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude

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God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night. But the night is limitless, and the Divine struggle will never cease.

ROMAIN ROLLAND

Jean-Christophe


Everyone who believes in God carries around a basic assumption of how God acts in relation with us. The French novelist Flaubert said that a great writer should stand in his novel like God in his creation: nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard. God is everywhere and yet invisible, silent, seemingly absent and indifferent. A few intellectuals may enjoy worshiping such an absentee God, but most Christians prefer Jesus' image of a God as a loving father. We need more than a watchmaker who winds up the universe and lets it tick. We need love and mercy and forgiveness and grace -- qualities only a personal God can offer.

PHILIP YANCEY

Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find?


Who knoweth God the sum of science owns.
The heavens record His handiwork; the earth
Worships His footsteps; life His breath repeats;
The soul His image; everlasting space,
The harmonies of His nature echoing, round
Reflects His vast extension; the great whole,
His boundless being, and His infinite mind.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY

Universal Hymn


The divine qualities of man are but the slightest hints, the faintest intimations, of the attributes of God.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


God writes a lot of comedy ... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

GARRISON KEILLOR

Happy to be Here


God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

EMIL CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born


The longer I live and the more I see
Of the struggle of souls toward the heights above,
The stronger this truth comes home to me:
That the Universe rests on the shoulders of love;
A love so limitless, deep, and broad,
That men have renamed it and called it--God.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Deathless"


I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

WILLIAM JAMES

Lecture III, "Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered," Pragmatism


God is Alpha and Omega in the great world, let us endeavour to make him so in the little world; let us practice to make him our last thought at night when we sleep; and our first in the morning when we awake; so shall our fancy be sanctified in the night, and our understanding rectified in the day; so shall our rest be peaceful, and our labours prosperous; our life pious, and our death glorious.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine


I wouldn't wanna do anything to hurt God. He's got enough trouble with the Russians and all.

THEODORE "BEAVER" CLEAVER

Leave it to Beaver


And I knew not God to be a Spirit, not one who hath parts extended in length and breadth, or whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole: and if it be infinite, it must be less in such part as is defined by a certain space, than in its infinitude; and so is not wholly every where, as Spirit, as God. And what that should be in us, by which we were like to God, and might be rightly said to be after the image of God, I was altogether ignorant.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

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God, so to speak, is myriad-minded. We cannot look, therefore, to put ourselves in accord with his plans any more than any one man can run a line for a railroad which it requires a small army to survey.

SAMUEL WILLOUGHBY DUFFIELD

Fragments

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God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.

RICHARD FEYNMAN

attributed, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything


I love God's shadow better than man's light.

MADAME SWETCHINE

"Thoughts," The Writings of Madame Swetchine


If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott


Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.

JIMMY CARTER

Living Faith


Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself in, and the more we live and know of our own souls and of spiritual experiences generally, the more we shall be convinced that we have to do with one who is good and just.

HUGH R. HAWEIS

Speech in Season

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