Quotes
Quotes about God
Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
Happy is he who bears a god within.
The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God.
Take man's most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.
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.
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. "God wishes," said Calvin, "that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory.".
It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own image. Rather does he create Him in the image of his cravings and dreams- in the image of what man wants to be. God making could be part of the process by which a society realizes its aspirations: it first embodies them in the conception of a particular God, and then proceeds to imitate that God. The confidence requisite for attempting the unprecedented is most effectively generated by the fiction that in realizing the new we are imitating rather than originating. Our preoccupation with heaven can be part of an effort to find precedents for the unprecedented.
When the Greeks said, "Whom the gods love die young," they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.
Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.
We would not listen to those who were wont to say the voice of the people is the voice of God, for the voice of the mob is near akin to madness. [Lat., Nec audiendi sunt qui solent dicere vox populi, vox dei; cum tumultus vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.]
Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
He is next to the gods whom reason, and not passion, impels; and who, after weighing the facts, can measure the punishment with discretion. [Lat., Diis proximus ille est Quem ratio non ira movet: qui factor rependens Consilio punire potest.]
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity.
God gives quietness at last.
At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being.
God's glowing covenant.
O beautiful rainbow;--all woven of light! There's not in thy tissue one shadow of night; Heaven surely is open when thou dost appear. And, bending thee above, the angels draw near, And sing,--"The rainbow! the rainbow! The smile of God is here."
God loves an idle rainbow, No less than laboring seas.
It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
Darkness is the absence of light. Absences do not exist. Sin does not exist -Rajneesh- (Love's Light is the only reality.. says the unified field theory of physics.. God is the only Doer).
Say first, of God above or man below, What can we reason but from what we know?
Man has received direct from God only one instrument wherewith to know himself and to know his relation to the universe--he has no other--and that instrument is reason.
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
