GOD QUOTES III
quotations about God
In history the name of God is the terrible club with which all divinely inspired men, the great "virtuous geniuses," have beaten down the liberty, dignity, reason, and prosperity of man.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
It is your organized religions that have made it clear through their most sacred scriptures that cruelty and killing is an acceptable response to human frailty and human differences. This goes against every human instinct, but organized religion has reorganized human thoughts. Some humans have even been turned against their own instinct for survival. And so people go around maiming and killing each other, because they've been told quite directly that this is what God does to them--and what God wants them to do to each other.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
The New Revelations: A Conversation with God
God's mouth knows not how to speak falsehood, but he brings to pass every word.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
God is like a computer, the more software you put in, the greater the danger that extensions will conflict.
ALEXANDER WAUGH
God
Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
GAO XINGJIAN
The Other Shore
The different ideas which men form of God (whilst the scripture character of him is overlooked), result from the various dispositions and propensities which they derive from constitution, education, and habit. The voluptuary will imagine with a certain dissolute monarch (Charles II), that God will not damn a man for taking "a little pleasure in an irregular manner;" nor can the ambitious warrior or covetous oppressor be convinced that the supreme Being will demand a strict account of all the blood shed, or the injustice committed, in their respective pursuits: a speculating philosopher may imagine a deity too dignified to notice the conduct, or too clement to punish the crimes, of puny mortals; at least he will deem him very favorable to the self-wise, and such as are superior to vulgar prejudices, whatever he may do in respect to debauchees and sanguinary tyrants. Thus men's ideas of God are framed according to their own prevailing propensities; and then those ideas of him reciprocally tend to form their characters, and influence their conduct, both in respect of religious duties and in the common concerns of life.
THOMAS SCOTT
"On the Scripture Character of God", Essays on the Most Important Subjects in Religion
Our God is a household God, as well as a heavenly one. He has an altar in every man's dwelling; let him look to it when they rend it lightly, and pour out its ashes.
JOHN RUSKIN
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts.
MARQUIS DE SADE
Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue
God is himself a vast medicine for man. It is the heart of God that carries restoration, inspiration, aspiration, and final victory.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
It should not be so hard to believe in God, for man himself is scarcely less wonderful.
FRANK CRANE
"The Part of Me That Doubts," Four Minute Essays
If, it was natural to reason, God punishes men with eternal torment, it is surely lawful for men to use doses of it in a good cause.
JOSEPH MCCABE
A History of Torture
God is constantly better than his promise. He does not limit Himself by our expectations.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries. Our conception of God being derived from ourselves and the objects affecting us, we can form no idea except one made up of materials furnished by our experience and reflection. Therefore we select whatever powers and qualities we find amongst ourselves, and consider to be most commendable; we separate them from everything gross, material and imperfect, and heighten them to the utmost imaginable pitch; the aggregate of all these makes up our first rational conception of God.
SABINE-BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Living Philosophies
Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
London Calling, 1947
Are we to believe that God peculiarly dwells in temples made with hands--he who is a spirit, and occupies all space; that he needs articulated prayers--he who knows our thoughts before they are framed with words; that sprinklings and washings, that bread and wine, that mediation of trained priests--in short, that religion as a ritual, something in itself and for itself, with its own times, seasons, customs, and feelings, is acceptable to him or necessary to us? Away with such husks of form, such superstitions of the world's childhood! Let religion henceforth be a life; and life a religion. Let the heart, the conscience, the intellect, worship God and serve man, and the bondage of rites and times and symbols and external sanctities wholly disappear.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
All powers, all laws, are but the fair
Embodied thoughts of God.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
All things are full of God
If you want the fire of God, you must become the fuel of God.
TOMMY TENNEY
The God Chasers
I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.
JOHN LENNON
statement to reporters at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, August 11, 1966
Each person is entitled to some version of God that seems real, yet many versions contradict one another. The God of any religion is only a fragment of God. This has to be true, because a being who is unbounded has no image, no role to play, no location either inside or outside the cosmos, whereas religions offer many images--father, mother, lawgiver, judge, ruler of the universe.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
How to Know God