“Let me remind my readers that the term divine did not originally imply the existence of gods: on the contrary, gods were constructed to interpret man's experiences of this quality.”

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

The New Divinity (1964)
Context: God is a hypothesis constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about.... To say that God is ultimate reality is just semantic cheating, as well as being so vague as to become effectively meaningless... Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable, has lost its explanatory value and is becoming an intellectual and moral burden to our thought. It no longer convinces or comforts, and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.

Lecture XX, see [Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Harper &amp; Row, New York, 1967, 187, Transl. Ralph Manheim] German: [Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, Wigand, Leipzig, 1851, 241] <br class="br"> Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

From a letter to the California State board of Education (14 September 1972)

The Timeless Path (2009)

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 80

Location unknown
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

[2008, Christianity / Islam, World Wisdom, 105-106, 978-1-933316-49-9]
God, Outline

The Artist, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).