Quotes about God

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“A visiting pastor at our church in Plains once told a story about a priest from New Orleans. Father Flanagan’s parish lay in the central part of the city, close to many taverns. One night he was walking down the street and saw a drunk thrown out of a pub. The man landed in the gutter, and Father Flanagan quickly recognized him as one of his parishioners, a fellow named Mike. Father Flanagan shook the dazed man and said, “Mike!” Mike opened his eyes and Father Flanagan said, “You’re in trouble. If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me what it is.ℍ “Well, Father,” Mike replied, “I hope you’ll pray for me.” “Yes,” the priest answered, “I’ll pray for you right now.” He knelt down in the gutter and prayed, “Father, please have mercy on this drunken man.ℍ At this, a startled Mike woke up fully and said, “Father, please don’t tell God I’m drunk.ℍ Sometimes we don’t feel much of a personal relationship between God and ourselves, as though we have a secret life full of failures and sins that God knows nothing about. We want to involve God only when we plan to give thanks or when we’re in trouble and need help. But the rest of our lives, we’d rather keep to ourselves.”

“Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.”

“Worship is a posture of life that takes as its primary purpose the understanding of what it really means to love and revere God.”

“Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.”

“What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. 1
Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 22.”

“I have found God, but he is insufficient.”

“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why God? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off".”

“Dancers are the messengers of the gods.”

“O God, help me to win, but in thy wisdom if thou willest me not to win, then O God, make me a good loser.”

“In his early twenties, a man started collecting paintings, many of which later became famous: Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. Over the decades he amassed a wonderful collection. Eventually, the man’s beloved son was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam, where he died while trying to save his friend. About a month after the war ended, a young man knocked on the devastated father’s door. “Sir,” he said, “I know that you like great art, and I have brought you something not very great.” Inside the package, the father found a portrait of his son. With tears running down his cheeks, the father said, “I want to pay you for this.ℍ “No,” the young man replied, “he saved my life. You don’t owe me anything.ℍ The father cherished the painting and put it in the center of his collection. Whenever people came to visit, he made them look at it. When the man died, his art collection went up for sale. A large crowd of enthusiastic collectors gathered. First up for sale was the amateur portrait. A wave of displeasure rippled through the crowd. “Let’s forget about that painting!” one said. “We want to bid on the valuable ones,” said another. Despite many loud complaints, the auctioneer insisted on starting with the portrait. Finally, the deceased man’s gardener said, “I’ll bid ten dollars.ℍ Hearing no further bids, the auctioneer called out, “Sold for ten dollars!” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then the auctioneer said, “And that concludes the auction.” Furious gasps shook the room. The auctioneer explained, “Let me read the stipulation in the will: “Sell the portrait of my son first, and whoever buys it gets the entire art collection. Whoever takes my son gets everything.ℍ It’s the same way with God Almighty. Whoever takes his Son gets everything.”

“If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.”

“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”

“Fate can be one mean god at times.”

“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”

“And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods makes Heaven drowsy with the harmony.”

“God save us from gloomy saints!”

“The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God.”

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”

“Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”

“You have to live with the people to know their needs, and you have to live with God to know how to solve them.”

“He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.”

“The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.”

“Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.”

“May today there be peace within.

May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.

May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.

May you be content knowing you are a child of God.

Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.

It is there for each and every one of us.”

“One of the most poisonous of all Satan’s whispers is simply, “Things will never change.” That lie kills expectation, trapping our heart forever in the present. To keep desire alive and flourishing, we must renew our vision for what lies ahead. Things will not always be like this. Jesus has promised to “make all things new.” Eye has not seen, ear has not heard all that God has in store for his lovers, which does not mean “we have no clue so don’t even try to imagine,” but rather, you cannot outdream God. Desire is kept alive by imagination, the antidote to resignation. We will need imagination, which is to say, we will need hope.”

“On the Disc, the Gods aren't so much worshipped, as they are blamed.”

“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.”

“Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”

“God created dinosaurs. God destroyed dinosaurs. God created Man. Man destroyed God. Man created dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs eat man… Woman inherits the earth.”

“Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake.

All the vines are ripening
And the trees come into bud,
For my love's footsteps passing by
Are summoning the spring.

Rian's stars in the night
Shine more brightly over her,
The god's moon and the goddess's
Guard her with their light.

Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake”

“My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.”

“If you’ll dare to take your mind off your troubles, get your mind off your own needs and, instead, seek to be a blessing to other people, God will do more for you than you could even ask or think.”

“When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.”

“But man proposes, God disposes.”

“The more humble and obedient to God a man is, the more wise and at peace he will be in all that he does.”

“To see evil and call it good, mocks God. Worse, it makes goodness meaningless. A word without meaning is an abomination, for when the word passes beyond understanding the very thing the word stands for passes out of the world and cannot be recalled.”

“God loves you even on your blackest days, and He will always, be there to guide you home. All you have to do is look for the light of His love.”

“Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"”

“I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.”

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”

“Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.”

“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”

“Is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s blunders?”

“No pit is so deep that God is not deeper still”

“… we will stand amazed to see the topside of the tapestry and how God beautifully embroidered each circumstance into a pattern for our good and His glory.”

“When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.”

“Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.”

“The greatest miracle that God can do today is to take an unholy man out of an unholy world and make him holy, then put him back into that unholy world and keep him holy in it.”

“Oh, God, the lovebirds,” Magnus said, pulling the pillow off his face. “I hate happy couples.”

“There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”

“As iron cast into fire loses its rust and becomes glowing white, so he who turns completely to God is stripped of his sluggishness and changed into a new man.”

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

“When faced with a decision, many people say they are waiting for God. But I understand, in most cases, God is waiting for me.”

“You only have to have two loves in your life: for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time.”

“It is God to whom and with whom we travel, and while He is the end of our journey, He is also at every stopping place.”

“The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).”

“I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature."”

“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.”

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”

“God knew my needs and took care accordingly.”

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

“God doesn't care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go.”

“A noble and God-like character is not a thing of favor or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with God-like thoughts.”

“I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.”

“When our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters are considered both different and inferior in the eyes of the God we worship, this belief tends to permeate society and everyone suffers.”

“There are spaces of sorrow only God can touch.”

“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.”

“It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.”

“Man - a figment of God's imagination.”

“No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.”

“Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.”

“Without the fear of God, men do not even observe justice and charity among themselves.”

“The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”

“I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.”

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”

“You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew… God doesn't make the world this way. We do.”

“Sustaining faith is what sets you through those dark nights of the soul when you don’t know where to go or what to do, and it seems that you can’t last another day…but because of your faith in God, you do.”

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”

“Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off.”

“Where there is nothing, there is God.”

“My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.”

“I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.”

“There is nothing impossible with God. All the impossibility is with us when we measure God by the limitations of our unbelief.”

“Faith in God includes Faith in God's timing.”

“If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.”

“Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?”

“Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.”

“Focus on giants - you stumble.
Focus on God - Giants tumble.”

“God is never angry for His sake, only for ours.”

“Believe me, the library is the temple of God. Education is the most sacred religion of all.”

“This is war," he say quietly.
"Well thank God you're dressed for it, Griggs.”

“Good is not always God's will, but God's will is always good.”

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”