quotations about God
O Shepherd God, companion me on all the journeys of my life. Dance through the darkness with me.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
The Song of the Seed
People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom
The flame of my life burns low
Under the cluttered days,
Like a fire of leaves.
But always a little blue, sweet-smelling smoke
Goes up to God.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
Blue Smoke
Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Gods Will Have Blood
I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"Queen of the Black Coast," Weird Tales (1933)
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation?
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch 22
The God of the Old Testament did not distance Himself from His chosen people; He participated in their struggles and made Israel's enemies His own. Israel's own transgressions grieved Him and incited Him to a terrible wrath. Ours is no aloof Lord--no Buddha beyond it all or Zeus making light of mortal travail. Among the world religions Christianity is unique in presenting a suffering God, a God who took human suffering upon Himself and in His agony gave birth to mankind's salvation.
JOHN UPDIKE
In the Beauty of the Lilies
We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
ELIE WIESEL
The Paris Review, spring 1984
Now I think I know why gods
Are so partial to heights--to mountain
Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees
And thorn-guarded holy bombax,
Why petty household divinities
Will sooner perch on a rude board
Strung precariously from brittle rafters
Of a thatched roof
than sit squarely
On safe earth.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves. The Stoic, the Platonist, and the Epicurean, the Polytheist, the Dualist, and the Trinitarian, differ infinitely in their conceptions of its meaning. They agree only in considering it the most awful and most venerable of names, as a common term devised to express all of mystery, or majesty, or power, which the invisible world contains. And not only has every sect distinct conceptions of the application of this name, but scarcely two individuals of the same sect, who exercise in any degree the freedom of their judgment, or yield themselves with any candour of feeling to the influences of the visible world, find perfect coincidence of opinion to exist between them.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Essay on Christianity"
Let nothing disturb thee,
Let nothing affright thee;
All passeth away:
God only shall stay.
Patience wins all:
Who hath God, needeth nothing;
For God is his All.
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Exclamations of the Soul to God
It is too frequent to begin with God and end with the World. But He is the good man's Beginning and End; his Alpha and Omega.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
All ways are byeways but the way of God,
So broad, not thought a road.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Universal Hymn
I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me -- I actually took my teachers seriously!
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Elmer Gantry
It is highly convenient to believe in the infinite mercy of God when you feel the need of mercy, but remember also his infinite justice.
B. R. HAYDON
Table Talk
As the innermost Essence of God is self-existence, so the cosmos (by which we mean everything not-God) is essentially dependent on God as its first and sole cause. The universe is no ens a se; it is entirely ab alio. This dependency is co-existent with the universe in all its phases. From the moment of its creation down to the hour of its consummation the universe is and remains essentially ens ab alio. It depends on God for its being and operation, and would sink back into nothingness without Him.
JOSEPH POHLE
God: The Author of Nature and the Supernatural
Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Those who know God know that it is quite a mistake to suppose that there are only five senses.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod, the Root, and the Flower
God is only a great imaginative experience.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence