quotations about God
The confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust be right, then is your god also true; and, on the other hand, if your trust be false and wrong, then you have not the true God; for these two belong together faith and God. That now, I say, upon which you set your heart and put your trust is properly your god.
MARTIN LUTHER
Large Catechism
My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning, and may be many; but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.
God is the ground, the substance,
the teaching, the teacher,
the purpose, and the reward for which every soul labors.
JULIAN OF NORWICH
Meditations with Julian of Norwich
God does not refuse to make himself known to man. He only will not do it by the symbolism of matter. He comes to us at once by the most natural course. We are in a transient state; our bodies are accidental, and God comes to us by that which is higher and truer--the intuitions of the soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Try to comprehend the unity of all; there is one God, and all are one in Him. If we can but bring home to ourselves the unity of that Eternal Love, there will be no more sorrow for us; for we shall realize, not for ourselves alone but for those whom we love, that whether we live or die, we are the Lord's, and that in Him we live and move and have our being, whether it be in this world or in the world to come.
C. W. LEADBEATER
The Science of the Sacraments
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sep. 28, 1949
With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
It wasn't that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone, it would be a tender and compassionate religion.... No, what Adelia objected to was the Church's interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, moneygrubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any inquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
STEVE ALLEN
More Steve Allen on the Bible
I do not believe in God, but I am afraid of Him.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Love in the Time of Cholera
I don't want to start
Any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's
Got a sick sense of humour
And when I die
I expect to find Him laughing
DEPECHE MODE
"Blasphemous Rumours"
For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
attributed, Has Science Discovered God?: A Symposium of Modern Scientific Opinion (Cotton
Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
If we are made in the image of God, we actually can find out something about this Mind Behind It All by looking at ourselves, just as we can better understand the personalities of Michelangelo and Picasso and Monet by looking at their work.
WILLIAM J. O'MALLEY
God: The Oldest Question