
“I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”
Act 1
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
“I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.”
Act 1
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
XII. The origin of evil things; and that there is no positive evil.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: If evil exists it must exist either in Gods or minds or souls or bodies. It does not exist in any God, for all god is good. If anyone speaks of a "bad mind" he means a mind without mind. If of a bad soul, he will make the soul inferior to body, for no body in itself is evil. If he says that evil is made up of soul and body together, it is absurd that separately they should not be evil, but joined should create evil.
“A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist.”
Episode 692: "Buzzwords of Ignorance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t25A6A_2uc, Channel Austin (January 16, 2011)
The Atheist Experience
Stig Bjorkman interview <!-- pages 12-14 -->
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: That I wasn't interested in politics or social matters, that's dead right. I was utterly indifferent. After the war and the discovery of the concentration camps, and with the collapse of political collaborations between the Russians and the Americans, I just contracted out. My involvement became religious. I went in for a psychological, religious line... the salvation-damnation issue, for me, was never political. It was religious. For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour. My revolt against bourgeois society was a revolt-against-the-father. I was a peripheral fellow, regarded with deep suspicion from every quarter... When I arrived in Gothenburg after the war, the actors at the Municipal Theatre fell into distinct groups: old ex-Nazis, Jews, and anti-Nazis. Politically speaking, there was dynamite in that company: but Torsten Hammaren, the head of the theatre, held it together in his iron grasp.
[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 297]
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.”
Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.
“"Heart – “It is absolutely certain that God does exist.””
stray reflections http://www.allamaiqbal.com/
“The only excuse for God is that He does not exist.”
As quoted in "A Sentimental Education" by James Huneker, Scribner's Magazine, Vol. 43 (1908), p. 230, also quoted in Albert Camus's The Rebel and Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.
“If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Detachment (1947), p. 260
Source: Gravity and Grace
Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)