Clement of Alexandria: Quotes about God

“Let everything you do be done for God, both deeds and words; and refer all that is yours to Christ; and constantly turn your soul to God; and lean your thought on the power of Christ. … Let Christ be to you continual and unceasing joy.”

Clement of Alexandria

Source: To the Newly Baptized, pp. 373-374.

God , Soul , Joy , Christ

“To me, therefore, that Thracian Orpheus, that Theban, and that Methymnaean,--men, and yet unworthy of the name,--seem to have been deceivers, who, under the pretence of poetry corrupting human life, possessed by a spirit of artful sorcery for purposes of destruction, celebrating crimes in their orgies, and making human woes the materials of religious worship, were the first to entice men to idols; nay, to build up the stupidity of the nations with blocks of wood and stone,--that is, statues and images,--subjecting to the yoke of extremest bondage the truly noble freedom of those who lived as free citizens under heaven by their songs and incantations. But not such is my song, which has come to loose, and that speedily, the bitter bondage of tyrannizing demons; and leading us back to the mild and loving yoke of piety, recalls to heaven those that had been cast prostrate to the earth. It alone has tamed men, the most intractable of animals; the frivolous among them answering to the fowls of the air, deceivers to reptiles, the irascible to lions, the voluptuous to swine, the rapacious to wolves. The silly are stocks and stones, and still more senseless than stones is a man who is steeped in ignorance. As our witness, let us adduce the voice of prophecy accordant with truth, and bewailing those who are crushed in ignorance and folly: "For God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham;" and He, commiserating their great ignorance and hardness of heart who are petrified against the truth, has raised up a seed of piety, sensitive to virtue, of those stones--of the nations, that is, who trusted in stones. Again, therefore, some venomous and false hypocrites, who plotted against righteousness, he once called "a brood of vipers."”

Clement of Alexandria

But if one of those serpents even is willing to repent, and follows the Word, he becomes a man of God.
Exhortation to the Heathen

Love , Life , Men , God

“Cultivate quietness in word, quietness in deed, likewise in speech and gait; and avoid impetuous eagerness, for then the mind will remain steady, and will not be agitated by your eagerness. … For the mind, seated on high on a quiet throne looking intently towards God, must control the passions, … so that your quietness may be adorned by good proportion and your bearing may appear something divine.”

Clement of Alexandria

Source: To the Newly Baptized, p. 371.

God , Appearance , Passion

“We shall not err in alleging that all things necessary and profitable for life came to us from God, and that philosophy more especially was given to the Greeks, as a covenant peculiar to them, being, as it were, a stepping stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ.”

Clement of Alexandria

Miscellanies, VI, 8

Life , God , Christ

“Men who offer laudatory speeches to the rich … are impious, because, while neglecting to praise and glorify the only perfect and good God, from whom are all things and through whom are all things and to whom are all things, they invest with His prerogative men who are wallowing in a riotous and filthy life.”

Clement of Alexandria

Source: The Rich Man's Salvation, p. 271.

Life , Men , God , Perfection

“How can it not be necessary, for him who wishes to lay hold of the power of God, to philosophise and to grasp with comprehension intellectual concepts?”

Clement of Alexandria

As reported in Clement of Alexandria by Eric Osborn (Cambridge University Press: 2008), p. 63.

God