Quotes about god

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep - pain that cannot forget; Falls drop by drop upon the heart, And in our own despite, against our will, Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

— Aeschylus

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.

— Maya Angelou

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.

— Jean Anouilh

God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.

— W. H. Auden

God brings men into deep waters not to drown them, but to cleanse them.

— John H. Aughey

I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within.

— St. Augustine

I went to the root of things, and found nothing but Him alone.

— Mira Bai

People see God every day; they just don't recognize Him.

— Pearl Bailey

We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.

— Natalie Clifford Barney

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

— Georges Bataille

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.

— Samuel Beckett

The bastard! He doesn't exist!

— Samuel Beckett

And now Israel, what does the Lord your God require from you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. [Deuteronomy 10:12]

— Bible

But from there you will seek the Lord you God and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul. [Deuteronomy 4:29]

— Bible

For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. [I Corinthians]

— Bible

God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent; has he not said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good? [Numbers 23:19]

— Bible

Oh the depth of both the wisdom and riches of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways beyond understanding.

— Bible

A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!

— Andre Breton

All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.

— Anita Brookner

God hears no more than the heart speaks; and if the heart be dumb, God will certainly be deaf.

— Thomas Brooks

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

— Lenny Bruce

If someone were to prove to me -- right this minute -- that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior.

— Luis Bunuel

I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.

— William S. Burroughs

As you know, God is generally on the side of the big squadrons against the small ones.

— Comte De Bussy-Rabutin

If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.

— Samuel Butler

The one thing that a fish can never find is water; and the one thing that man can never find is God.

— Eric Butterworth

God can only do for you what He can do through you.

— Eric Butterworth

Fundamentalists believe Jesus was God becoming man. I believe that Jesus was man becoming God.

— Eric Butterworth

Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.

— Elias Canetti

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

— Angela Carter

When I was young, I said to God, god, tell me the mystery of the universe. But God answered, that knowledge is for me alone. So I said, god, tell me the mystery of the peanut. Then God said, well, George, that's more nearly your size.

— George Washington Carver

The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.

— Richard Cecil

Man appoints, and God disappoints.

— Miguel De Cervantes

Though God's attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice.

— Miguel De Cervantes

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

— Winston Churchill

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

— E. M. Cioran

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

— E. M. Cioran

All the gods are dead except the god of war.

— Eldridge Cleaver

It is not a difficult matter to learn what it means to delight ourselves in the Lord. It is to live so as to please Him, to honor everything we find in His Word, to do everything the way He would like to have it done, and for Him.

— S. Maxwell Coder

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

— Cyril Connolly

We may seek God by our intellect, but we only can find him with our heart.

— Cotvos

If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.

— Mary Daly

Why indeed must God be a noun? Why not a verb -- the most active and dynamic of all.

— Mary Daly

In His will is our peace.

— Dante Alighieri

One and God make a majority.

— Frederick Douglass

Jesus might have said, I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.

— Meister Eckhart

To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.

— Meister Eckhart

The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.

— Meister Eckhart

Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door.

— Meister Eckhart

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.

— Meister Eckhart

God does not play dice with the universe.

— Albert Einstein

God is clever, but not dishonest.

— Albert Einstein

God is subtle, but He is not malicious. I cannot believe that God plays dice with the world.

— Albert Einstein

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The dice of God are always loaded.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a crack in everything God has made.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

God hath entrusted me with myself.

— Epictetus

And some to Meccah turn to pray, and I toward thy bed, Yasmin.

— James Elroy Flecker

I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.

— Henry Ford

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

— Sigmund Freud

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

— Robert Frost

God is a verb.

— Buckminster Fuller

Here is God's purpose -- for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

The mantram becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God.

— Mahatma Gandhi

God is more concerned about who you are than what you do, and He is more concerned about what you do than where you do it.

— Gary Gulbranson

God is concerned with nations, but nations also need to be concerned with God. No nation can have a monopoly on God, but God will bless any nation whose people seek and honor His will as revealed by Christ and declared through the Holy Spirit.

— John Haggai

The only way God could impose peace on the world would be to robotize our wills and rob every human being of the power of choice. He has not chosen to do that. He has given every person a free will.

— John Haggai

Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself.

— H. R. Haweis

God has been so lavish in his gifts that you can lose some priceless ones, the equivalent of whole kingdoms, and still be indecently rich,

— Wilfrid Heed

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

— Heraclitus

Throw away thy rod, throw away thy wrath; O my God, take the gentle path.

— George Herbert

To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.

— Eric Hoffer

Having given us the package, do you think God will deny us the ribbon?

— Oswald C. Hoffman

I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.

— R. J. Hollingdale

Providence certainly does not favor just certain individuals, but the deep wisdom of its counsel, instruction and ennoblement extends to all.

— Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.

— William James

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

— Alfred Jarry

Abide in peace, banish cares, take no account of all that happens, and you will serve God according to his good pleasure and rest in him.

— St. John of the Cross

We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.

— Joseph Joubert

Man proposes, but God disposes.

— Thomas Kempis

He does much who loves God much, and he does much who does his deed well, and he does his deed well who does it rather for the common good than for his own will.

— Thomas Kempis

Don't think so much about who is for or against you, rather give all your care, that God be with you in everything you do.

— Thomas Kempis

The intention which is fixed on God as its only end will keep people steady in their purposes, and deliver them from being the joke and scorn of fortune.

— Thomas Kempis

There is no God but God.

— The Koran

I would not like to see a person who is sober, moderate, chaste and just say that there is no God. They would speak disinterestedly at least, but such a person is not to be found.

— Jean De La Bruyere

Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.

— William Law

God is only a great imaginative experience.

— D. H. Lawrence

I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery -- such suffering, such dreadful suffering -- and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?

— D. H. Lawrence

God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.

— Irving Layton

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

— John Lennon

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

— C. S. Lewis

It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.

— Abraham Lincoln

Some people think that God peers over the balcony of heaven trying to find anybody who is enjoying life. And when He spots a happy person, He yells, Now cut that out! That concept of God should make us shudder because it's blasphemous!

— Paul Little

Has it ever struck you that the vast majority of the will of God for your life has already been revealed in the Bible? That is a crucial thing to grasp.

— Paul Little

I was frustrated out of my mind, trying to figure out the will of God. I was doing everything but getting into the presence of God and asking Him to show me.

— Paul Little

Others think it's a choice between doing what we want to do and being happy, and doing what God wants us to do and being miserable.

— Paul Little

The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.

— Martin Luther