Quotes about God
page 53

Sam Kinison photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Stendhal photo

“Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?”

Napoléon était bien l'homme envoyé de Dieu pour les jeunes Français! Qui le remplacera?
Vol. I, ch. XVII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Keshub Chunder Sen photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“The Declaration of Independence announces the sublime truth, that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Individuality http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/individuality.html (1873).
Context: The Declaration of Independence announces the sublime truth, that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others. It was the first grand assertion of the dignity of the human race. It declared the governed to be the source of power, and in fact denied the authority of any and all gods. Through the ages of slavery — through the weary centuries of the lash and chain, God was the acknowledged ruler of the world. To enthrone man, was to dethrone God.

Sigmund Freud photo
James Hamilton photo
Jacques de Molay photo

“Let evil swiftly befall those who have wrongly condemned us - God will avenge us.”

Jacques de Molay (1243–1314) Grand Master of the Knights Templar

Before he died it is said that he cursed both King Phillip and Pope Clement V, summoning them before God, the Supreme Judge, before the year was over.

Deendayal Upadhyaya photo
Albert Camus photo
Jorge Luis Borges photo

“Razed the garden, profaned the chalices and the altars, by horse the Huns broke into the Monastic library and they tore the incomprehensible books and they vituperated them and they burnt them, fearing their symbols and characters might be concealing secret blasphemies against their God, who was an iron scimitar…”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro.
The Theologians [Los Teólogos]

Julian of Norwich photo
H. G. Wells photo
Báb photo

“In the Name of God, the Most Exalted, the Most Holy. All praise and glory befitteth the sacred and glorious court of the sovereign Lord, Who from everlasting hath dwelt, and unto everlasting will continue to dwell within the mystery of His Own divine Essence, Who from time immemorial hath abided and will forever continue to abide within His transcendent eternity, exalted above the reach and ken of all created beings. The sign of His matchless Revelation as created by Him and imprinted upon the realities of all beings, is none other but their powerlessness to know Him. The light He hath shed upon all things is none but the splendour of His Own Self. He Himself hath at all times been immeasurably exalted above any association with His creatures. He hath fashioned the entire creation in such wise that all beings may, by virtue of their innate powers, bear witness before God on the Day of Resurrection that He hath no peer or equal and is sanctified from any likeness, similitude or comparison. He hath been and will ever be one and incomparable in the transcendent glory of His divine being and He hath ever been indescribably mighty in the sublimity of His sovereign Lordship. No one hath ever been able befittingly to recognize Him nor will any man succeed at any time in comprehending Him as is truly meet and seemly, for any reality to which the term ‘being’ is applicable hath been created by the sovereign Will of the Almighty, Who hath shed upon it the radiance of His Own Self, shining forth from His most august station. He hath moreover deposited within the realities of all created things the emblem of His recognition, that everyone may know of a certainty that He is the Beginning and the End, the Manifest and the Hidden, the Maker and the Sustainer, the Omnipotent and the All-Knowing, the One Who heareth and perceiveth all things, He Who is invincible in His power and standeth supreme in His Own identity, He Who quickeneth and causeth to die, the All-Powerful, the Inaccessible, the Most Exalted, the Most High. Every revelation of His divine Essence betokens the sublimity of His glory, the loftiness of His sanctity, the inaccessible height of His oneness and the exaltation of His majesty and power. His beginning hath had no beginning other than His Own firstness and His end knoweth no end save His Own lastness.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

I, 1
The Persian Bayán

Glen Cook photo
George Holmes Howison photo
John Heywood photo

“The nere to the churche, the ferther from God.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

The nearer to the church, the farther from God.
Part I, chapter 9.
Proverbs (1546)

Léon Bloy photo

“Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.”

Léon Bloy (1846–1917) French writer, poet and essayist

Pope Francis quotes Bloy in his first homily as Pope. Pope Francis: 1st homily. Missa pro Ecclesiae in the Sistine Chapel http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-1st-homily-full-text

Samuel Butler photo

“Thought pure and simple is as near to God as we can get; it is through this that we are linked with God.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Thought and Word, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

Pythagoras photo

“Disbelieve nothing wonderful concerning the gods, nor concerning divine dogmas.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

Symbol 4
The Symbols

Henry Benjamin Whipple photo
Victor Villaseñor photo

“You have to create the space for God to fill.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 53

David Berg photo
Rich Mullins photo
Arthur Hugh Clough photo
William Penn photo

“The Country is both the Philosopher’s Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

223
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I

Muammar Gaddafi photo
William Jennings Bryan photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“We too know the Jesus that the minister referred to. We have had an experience with him and we believe firmly in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. I can see no conflict between our devotion to Jesus Christ and our present action. In fact, I can see a necessary relationship. If one is truly devoted to the religion of Jesus he will seek to rid the earth of social evils. The gospel is social as well as personal..”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Stride Toward Freedom (1958); also quoted in The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1982), by Stephen B. Oates, pp. 81-82
1950s
Variant: We believe firmly in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. I can see no conflict between our devotion to Jesus Christ and our present action. In fact, I can see a necessary relationship. If one is truly devoted to the religion of Jesus he will seek to rid the earth of social evils. The gospel is social as well as personal.

Ben Carson photo

“"You do your best, we do the rest." That fit the way I felt about God. I was going to give God my best and then it was up to God to do the rest.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 46

Sri Aurobindo photo

“When I was mounting upon ever higher crests of His joy, I asked myself whether there was no limit to the increase of bliss and almost I grew afraid of God's embraces.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

Jeremy Clarkson photo

“Funnily enough, Daihatsu are one of the better interior stylists. God knows how they do it.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Source: Clarkson on Cars (1996), p. 62

Leo Tolstoy photo

“It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 5

David Weber photo
Alan Keyes photo
Tanith Lee photo

“When a sinner has any just sense of his condition, as alienated from a holy God, he will not be apt to think of the unpardonable sin.”

Ichabod Spencer (1798–1854) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 553.

Russell Brand photo
Henry Adams photo
Charlotte Brontë photo
Pat Condell photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo
Will Eisner photo
George Bernard Shaw photo

“God is on the side of the big battalions.”

Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)
1920s

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel photo

“At the words “his philosophy, my philosophy,” one is always reminded of that line in Nathan: … “What kind of God is it who belongs to a man?””

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Bei den Ausdrücken, „Seine Philosophie”, „Meine Philosophie”, erinnert man sich immer an die Worte im Nathan: „Wem eignet Gott? Was ist das für ein Gott, der einem Menschen eignet?”
Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 99, reference is to Lessing, Nathan der Weise

Noel Coward photo
Peter Akinola photo
Charles Dickens photo
Immanuel Kant photo

“He [Jesus] claims that not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God (Matthew V, 20-48); … that injury done one’s neighbor can be repaired only through satisfaction rendered to the neighbor himself, not through acts of divine worship (V, 24). Thus, he says, does he intend to do full justice to the Jewish law (V, 17); whence it is obvious that not scriptural scholarship but the pure religion of reason must be the law’s interpreter, for taken according to the letter, it allowed the very opposite of all this. Furthermore, he does not leave unnoticed, in his designations of the strait gate and the narrow way, the misconstruction of the law which men allow themselves in order to evade their true moral duty, holding themselves immune through having fulfilled their churchly duty (VII, 13). He further requires of these pure dispositions that they manifest themselves also in works (VII, 16) and, on the other hand, denies the insidious hope of those who imagine that, through invocation and praise of the Supreme Lawgiver in the person of His envoy, they will make up for their lack of good works and ingratiate themselves into favor (VII, 21). Regarding these works he declares that they ought to be performed publicly, as an example for imitation (V, 16), and in a cheerful mood, not as actions extorted from slaves (VI, 16); and that thus, from a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God (XIII, 31-33).”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

John Angell James photo
Karl Barth photo
Paul Cézanne photo

“You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [ Zola was his youth friend, who used Cezanne as a model in Zola's novel 'L'Oeuvre'] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in a conversation with Vollard in Cezanne's studio in Aix - after the death of Zola in 1902; as quoted in Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

R. A. Lafferty photo
Kent Hovind photo
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus photo

“Prayed for so oft, the dawn of fight is come.
No more entreat the gods: with sword in hand
Seize on our fates; and Caesar in your deeds
This day is great or little.”

Nil opus est uotis, iam fatum accersite ferro. in manibus uestris, quantus sit Caesar, habetis.

Book VII, line 252 (tr. E. Ridley).
Pharsalia

Carl Sagan photo

“If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It… prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intracacy?”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Hema Malini photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Irenaeus photo

“For the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.”
Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei.

Irenaeus (130–202) Bishop and saint

Book 4, Chapter 34, Section 7 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101074938968;view=1up;seq=231.
Often mistranslated as "The glory of God is man fully alive" (see http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=25-05-003-e).
The context of the passage https://web.archive.org/web/20170126222027/http://earlychurchtexts.com/public/irenaeus_glory_of_god_humanity_alive.htm is: "And for this reason did the Word become the dispenser of the paternal grace for the benefit of men, for whom He made such great dispensations, revealing God indeed to men, but presenting man to God, and preserving at the same time the invisibility of the Father, lest man should at any time become a despiser of God, and that he should always possess something towards which he might advance; but, on the other hand, revealing God to men through many dispensations, lest man, falling away from God altogether, should cease to exist. For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God. For if the manifestation of God which is made by means of the creation, affords life to all living in the earth, much more does that revelation of the Father which comes through the Word, give life to those who see God."
Against Heresies

James A. Garfield photo
Andrew Linzey photo
Prem Rawat photo

“Question: Guru Maharaji Ji, what do you mean about the mind being evil? Answer: This mind is jiggling around trying to find out that perfectness. It is inquiring, trying to investigate the perfectness, which is impossible. To the mind, God is a perfect criminal. He has done such a perfect crime by creating this world that mind cannot trace how He did it. That is why the mind always freaks out about God.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

September 1973, Los Angeles, USA, published in Light Reading Vol.1 No.1 Spring 1978 “Question on devotion and other answers”
Students of Prem Rawat clarify that at that time Rawat was making a distinction between the mind, which he described as including the dark or negative thoughts that a person may have; and heart, the place within each person where peace can be found.
1970s

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“One unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above;
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it—God is love.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

What we all think; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare Browning, Paracelsus: "God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that".

“Faith and God belong together somewhat as sense experience and physical reality do.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960), p. 13

Ramakrishna photo
Kage Baker photo
Christian Scriver photo

“God has given you your child, that the sight of him, from time to time, might remind you of His goodness, and induce you to praise Him with filial reverence.”

Christian Scriver (1629–1693) German hymnwriter

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 50.

Laurence Sterne photo

“God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb.”

Maria. Compare: "Dieu mésure le froid à la brebis tondue" (translated: "God measures the cold to the shorn lamb"), Henri Estienne (1594), Prémices, etc, p. 47; "To a close-shorn sheep God gives wind by measure", George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

Bill Hybels photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“We are very blessed to call this nation our home. And that is what America is: it is our home. It’s where we raise our families, care for our loved ones, look out for our neighbors, and live out our dreams. It is my prayer, that on this Thanksgiving, we begin to heal our divisions and move forward as one country, strengthened by a shared purpose and very, very common resolve. In declaring this national holiday, President Lincoln called upon Americans to speak with “one voice and one heart.” That’s just what we have to do. We have just finished a long and bruising political campaign. Emotions are raw and tensions just don’t heal overnight. It doesn’t go quickly, unfortunately, but we have before us the chance now to make history together to bring real change to Washington, real safety to our cities, and real prosperity to our communities, including our inner cities. So important to me, and so important to our country. But to succeed, we must enlist the effort of our entire nation. This historic political campaign is now over. Now begins a great national campaign to rebuild our country and to restore the full promise of America for all of our people. I am asking you to join me in this effort. It is time to restore the bonds of trust between citizens. Because when America is unified, there is nothing beyond our reach, and I mean absolutely nothing. Let us give thanks for all that we have, and let us boldly face the exciting new frontiers that lie ahead. Thank you. God Bless You and God Bless America.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

A Thanksgiving Message from President-Elect Donald J. Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUnv6Kb7syQ (23 November 2016)
2010s, 2016, November

Báb photo
Prem Rawat photo
Báb photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo

“Love is a contradiction if there is no God.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity

Meher Baba photo

“If God can be found through the medium of any drug, God is not worthy of being God.”

God in a Pill? : Meher Baba on L.S.D. and The High Roads (1966)
General sources

Henry Edward Manning photo

“God knows that I would rather stand in the lowest place within the Truth, than in the highest without it. Nay, outside the Truth the higher the worse. It is only so much more opposition to Truth, so much more propagation of falsehood.”

Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892) English Roman Catholic archbishop and cardinal

Letter to Robert Wilberforce (Rome, 15 February 1848); in Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Vol. I (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896), p. 513.

George Bernard Shaw photo

“I heard your prayers Thank God it's all over!”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Act IV
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

William Lane Craig photo

“Heaven may not be a possible world when you take it in isolation by itself. It may be that the only way in which God could actualize a heaven of free creatures all worshiping Him and not falling into sin would be by having, so to speak, this run-up to it, this advance life during which there is a veil of decision-making in which some people choose for God and some people against God. Otherwise you don't know that heaven is an actualizable world. You have no way of knowing that possibility.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

[The Craig-Bradley Debate: Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?, 1994, http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-bradley0.html], quoted in [William Lane Craig vs. Ray Bradley (debate review), Luke, Muehlhauser, 2011-04-27, Common Sense Atheism, http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=2523, 2011-10-21]

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo
Oliver Cromwell photo

“I would be willing to live and be farther serviceable to God and his people; but my work is done. Yet God will be with his people.”

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) English military and political leader

As quoted from "Dying Sayings" of Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches by Thomas Carlyle

Christopher Titus photo
Clarence Darrow photo
Daniel Tosh photo
Kate Bush photo

“Joanni, Joanni wears a golden cross
And she looks so beautiful in her armour
Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God
And she never wears a ring on her finger…”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sea of Honey (Disc 1)

Firuz Shah Tughlaq photo

“The idol, Jwalamukhi, much worshipped by the infidels, was situated on the road to Nagarkot Some of the infidels have reported that Sultan Firoz went specially to see this idol and held a golden umbrella over it. But the author was informed by his respected father, who was in the Sultans retinue, that the infidels slandered the Sultan, who was a religious, God-fearing man, who, during the whole forty years of his reign, paid strict obedience to the law, and that such an action was impossible. The fact is, that when he went to see the idol, all the rais, ranas and zamindars who accompanied him were summoned into his presence, when he addressed them, saying, O fools and weak-minded, how can ye pray to and worship this stone, for our holy law tells us that those who oppose the decrees of our religion, will go to hell? The Sultan held the idol in the deepest detestation, but the infidels, in the blindness of their delusion, have made this false statement against him. Other infidels have said that Sultan Muhammad Shah bin Tughlik Shah held an umbrella over the same idol, but this is also a lie; and good Muhammadans should pay no heed to such statements. These two Sultans were sovereigns especially chosen by the Almighty from among the faithful, and in the whole course of their reigns, wherever they took an idol temple they broke and destroyed it; how, then, can such assertions be true? The infidels must certainly have lied!”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Nagarkot Kangra (Himachal Pradesh) . Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. Elliot and Dowson. Vol. III, p. 318 ff

Horatio Nelson photo

“Bonaparte has often made his boast, that our fleet would be worn out by keeping the sea, that his was kept in order, and increasing, by staying in port; but he now finds, I fancy, if emperors hear truth, that his fleet suffers more in a night, than ours in one year; however, thank God, the Toulon fleet is got in order again, and I hear the troops embarked, and I hope they will come out to sea in fine weather.”

Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) Royal Navy Admiral

From a letter to Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, written while aboard HMS Victory and dated (14 March 1805), quoted in full in The Naval History of Great Britain from the year 1783 to 1822 by Captain Edward Pelham Brenton (1824), Vol III, p. 406
1800s

Dejan Stojanovic photo

“God is busy and has no time for you.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“God Is Busy,” p. 45
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: "Forgotten Place”

Pope Benedict XVI photo
Joyce Kilmer photo
Simone de Beauvoir photo

“It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Source: All Men are Mortal (1946), p. 81

Giorgio Vasari photo