quotations about God
"God is love," says the apostle. We might almost transpose the apothegm, and say "Love is God." That is, it is love which renders him worthy of our worship. It is not the power which made the worlds and allotted them their courses; it is not the wisdom which orders all of life, and suffers not even the minutest detail to escape his notice; it is not even those aesthetic qualities, which have produced in divinely-created forms of beauty the types of all art and all architecture, that render God worthy " to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing." It is that his love is such that nothing seems to him too sacred to be sacrificed to the welfare of others.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
How things stand, is God.
God is, how things stand.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Notebooks, Aug. 1, 1916
Whether men will or not, they must be subject always to the Divine Power. By denying the existence or providence of God, men may shake off their ease, but not their yoke.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
Nothing is more natural than that the belief in God, the creator, regulator, judge, master, curser, savior, and benefactor of the world, should still prevail among the people, especially in the rural districts, where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the cities. The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily labor, deprived of leisure, of intellectual intercourse, of reading, in short of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that develop thought in men, the people generally accept religious traditions without criticism and in a lump. These traditions surround them from infancy in all the situations of life, and artificially sustained in their minds by a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts, priests and laymen, are transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral habit, too often more powerful even than their natural good sense.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
An honest God's the noblest work of man.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Further Extracts from the Note Books
God appears and god is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Auguries of Innocence
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
But tho' God has replenished this world with abundance of good things for man's life and comfort, yet they are all but imperfect goods. He only is the perfect good to whom they point. But alas! Men cannot see him for them; tho' they should always see him in them.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Where there is most of God, there is least of self.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
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
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
It needed no divine revelation to assure us that God loves. The language of nature and the experience of our own hearts are an adequate witness to this truth, so simple as to be almost self-evident. That which gives to the Bible revelation of God's character its peculiar significance is the fact that it reveals him one who affords the highest exemplification of Christ's precept," Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you." The revelation of God's love, suffering for the sake of those that despise it, though so simple, is yet so august, so sublime, that our selfish hearts can not comprehend it, and our shallow philosophy obscures or denies it. Christ crucified is to-day as much as ever "unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness;" as much as ever the power and wisdom of God to those that comprehend it.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
We consider the Lord's express declarations concerning himself. There is a majesty in the passages of holy writ, that relate to the natural perfections of God, which vastly exceeds whatever is admired as sublime in Pagan writers. Jehovah speaks of himself, "as the high and lofty One, who inhabiteth eternity;" "heaven is his throne, and the earth his footstool;" "the heaven of heavens cannot contain him;" all "nations before Him are as nothing, they are counted to him as less than nothing and vanity;" "from everlasting to everlasting he is God;" "the almighty, the all-sufficient God:" "His wisdom is infinite;" "there is no searching of his understanding;" "He knoweth all things; he searcheth the hearts of all the children of men;" "yea, knoweth their thoughts afar off;" "there is no fleeing from his presence;" "the light and darkness to him are both alike;" "He dwelleth in light inaccessible; no man hath seen or can see him;" "He doeth what he will in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth;" "His is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever;" "He is most blessed for evermore;" "for with him is no change or shadow of turning." These, and numberless other declarations, expressly and emphatically ascribe eternity, self-existence omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, incomprehensible greatness and majesty, and essential felicity and glory, in full perfection, to the Lord our God.
THOMAS SCOTT
"On the Scripture Character of God", Essays on the Most Important Subjects in Religion
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"
You say you will never believe in God until the fact of his existence is proved to you! Then you will never believe in him at all; for, in the face of positive knowledge, faith is no longer possible. Faith affirms in the presence of the unknown. If science should ever demonstrate the existence of God (which it never can) faith would become lost in sight, and men would no longer believe, but know. The reason why science is intrinsically incompetent to either prove or disprove the existence of God, is simply this, that the subject-matter transcends the reach of scientific instruments and processes. The dispute is, therefore, not between faith and science, but between faith and unbelief. Unbelief is a disease, not of the human understanding, but of the human will, and is susceptible to cure.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Blazing Star
We rejoice in God since he has taught us that every thing which is true in us, is but a faint expression of what is in him. And thus all our joys become to us the echo of higher joys, and our very life is as a dream of that nobler life, to which we shall awaken when we die.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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
The word "God" is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness -- a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Literature and Dogma
Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit,
But God to man doth speak in solitude.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Highland Solitude