“Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: “I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe”; he can only say “that which I have seen eludes understanding”—and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe are nothing if they are not categories of the understanding.

If I said decisively, “I have seen God,” that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated.”

"Apology for Bad Dreams" in The Women at Point Sur (1927)

The Third Revelation, Chapter 11

As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne (1984)
Context: Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls's brief, in het Nederlands): Ik wil in den beschouwer mijne aandoeningen overbrengen, - ik wil hem laten boeijen door het tafereel, dat ik niet enkel met mijn bloot oog gezien hebben, maar dat ik diep in mij heb zien bewegen.
Quote of Israëls in his letter in 1891, to an unknown person; as cited in the museum-catalog, Museum Mesdag, 1996, p.236, note 10
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: It is an old remark, that as men are, such they paint their gods; and as in themselves the passionate, or demonic nature, long preponderated, so the gods they worshipped were demons like themselves, jealous, capricious, exacting, revengeful, the figures which fill the old mythologies, and appear partly in the Old Testament. They feared them as they feared the powerful of their own race, and sought to propitiate them by similar offerings and services.
Go on, and now we find ourselves on a third stage; but now fast rising into a clearing atmosphere. The absolute worth of goodness is seen as distinct from power; such beings as these demon gods could not he the highest beings. Good and evil could not coexist in one Supreme; absolutely different in nature, they could not have a common origin; the moral world is bipolar, and we have dualism, the two principles, coeternal, coequal.
By and by, again, the horizon widens. The ultimate identity of might and right glimmers out feebly in the Zenda Vesta as the stars come out above the mountains when we climb out of the mist of the valleys. The evil spirit is no longer the absolute independent Ahriman; but Ahriman and Ormuzd are but each a dependent spirit; and an awful formless, boundless figure, the eternal, the illimitable, looms out from the abyss behind them, presently to degrade still farther the falling Ahriman into a mere permitted Satan, finally to be destroyed.

Shake Hands with the Devil (2003)
Source: Shake Hands With The Devil

As quoted in a eulogy for Darrow by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1938)

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, p. 213