Quotes about God
page 71

John Ruysbroeck photo
Sir Alexander Cockburn, 12th Baronet photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Josiah Quincy II photo
Pope John Paul II photo

“This inscription awakens the memory of people whose sons and daughters were destined for total extermination. This people draws its origin from Abraham, our Father in faith. The very people that received from God the commandment, thou shalt not kill, itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

About a Hebrew commemorative plaque in the homily during the Holy Mass at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German concentration camp on 7 June 1979, during the pope's first apostolic journey to Poland
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19790607_polonia-brzezinka_it.html (Italian)

John Ruysbroeck photo
José Maria Eça de Queiroz photo

“Human effort may manage at its best to transform a starving proletariat into a well-fed bourgeoisie; but then a worse proletariat emerges from the bowels of society. Jesus was right, there will always be the poor among us. Which proves that this humanity is the greatest error that God ever committed.”

O esforço humano consegue, quando muito, converter um proletariado faminto numa burguesia farta; mas surge logo das entranhas da sociedade um proletariado pior. Jesus tinha razão: haverá sempre pobres entre nós. Donde se prova que esta humanidade é o maior erro que jamais Deus cometeu.

"O Natal"; "Christmas" pp. 36-7.
Cartas de Inglaterra (1879–82)

Madonna photo

“Publicly humiliating someone for your own gain will only come and haunt you. God’s going to have his revenge.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna Interview : Q Magazine, Q, 2003-04-01 http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-library/madonna-interview-q-magazine-april-2003,

Markandey Katju photo
Elia M. Ramollah photo
Amir Khusrow photo

“Praise be to God!, that he (the sultan) so ordered the massacre of all the chiefs of Hindustan out of the pale of Islam, by his infidel-smiting sword, that if in this time it should by chance happen that a schismatic should claim his right, the pure Sunnis would swear in the name of this Khalifa of God, that heterodoxy has no right.”

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

Amir Khusrau, Khazain-ul-Futuh, trs., in E.D. vol. III, p. 77. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3
Khazainu’l-Futuh

John Cleveland photo
Abbie Hoffman photo
John Ruysbroeck photo

“How great is the difference between The hidden child and the secret friend! For the friend makes only loving, Living but measured ascents toward God. But the child presses on to lose its own life upon the summits, in that simplicity which knoweth not itself.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Evelyn Underhill Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (1912), p. 433
The Sparkling Stone (c. 1340)

Will Eisner photo
John Ruysbroeck photo
Jorge Majfud photo
Karen Armstrong photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Fulton J. Sheen photo
William the Silent photo

“All in the world I have is yours; Next to God, you are the one I love best, and if I did not know that your love for me is the same, I could not be so happy as I am: May God give us both the grace to live always in this affection without any guile.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

To his first wife while she was dying (1558), as quoted William the Silent (1897) by Frederic Harrison, p. 28

Poul Anderson photo
André Maurois photo

“A married man seeks to please his wife and not God.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Cesar Chavez photo
Nicholas Murray Butler photo

“There is, I venture to think, no ground for the ordinarily accepted statement of the relation of philosophy to theology and religion. It is usually said that while^hilosophy is the creation of an individual mind, theology or religion is, like folk-lore and language, the product of the collective mind of a people or a race. This is to confuse philosophy with philosophies, a conmion and, it must be admitted, a not unnatural confusion. But while a philosophy is the creation of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel, ^hilosophy itself is, like religion, folk-lore and language, a product of the collective mind of humanity. It is advanced, as these are, by individual additions, interpretations and syntheses, but it is none the less quite istinct from such individual contributions. philosophy is humanity's hold on Totality, and it becomes richer and more helpful as man's intellectual horizon widens, as his intellectual vision grows clearer, and as his insights become more numerous and more sure. Theology is philosophy of a particular type. It is an interpretation of Totality in terms of God and His activities. In the impressive words of Principal Caird, that philosophy which is theology seeks "to bind together objects and events in the links of necessary thought, and to find their last ground and reason in that which comprehends and transcends all— the nature of God Himself." Religion is the apprehension and the adoration of the Grod Whom theology postulates.
If the whole history of philosophy be searched for material with which to instruct the beginner in what philosophy really is and in its relation to theology and religion, the two periods or epochs that stand out above all others as useful for this purpose are Greek thought from Thales to Socrates, and that interpretation of the teachings of Christ by philosophy which gave rise, at the hands of the Church Fathers, to Christian theology. In the first period we see the simple, clear-cut steps by which the mind of Europe was led from explanations that were fairy-tales to a natural, well-analyzed, and increasingly profound interpretation of the observed phenomena of Nature. The process is so orderly and so easily grasped that it is an invaluable introduction to the study of philosophic thinking. In the second period we see philosophy, now enriched by the literally huge contributions of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, intertwining itself about the simple Christian tenets and building the great system of creeds and thought which has immortalized the names of Athanasius and Hilary, Basil and Gregory, Jerome and Augustine, and which has given color and form to the intellectual life of Europe for nearly two thousand years. For the student of today both these developments have great practical value, and the astonishing neglect and ignorance of them both are most discreditable.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

" Philosophy" (a lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series on science, philosophy and art, March 4, 1908) https://archive.org/details/philosophyalect00butlgoog"

Michael Chabon photo
George Holmes Howison photo

“The aim, the only ultimate aim, the ideal of a society of minds, is this moral reliance on the inherent moral freedom of all spirits, guided by the contemplation of its perfect fulfilment in the Supreme Soul, or God, and inspired by his boundless love beheld and therefore felt by all.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.251

“No suffering can be foreign to a Christian, not even the anguish that comes with the loss of God.”

Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927–2018) American radical theologian

The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), p. 23

John Dryden photo

“With ravished ears
The monarch hears;
Assumes the god,
Affects the nod,
And seems to shake the spheres.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Alexander’s Feast http://www.bartleby.com/40/265.html (1697), l. 37–41.

Antonin Scalia photo
Michael Franti photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
Derren Brown photo
Izaak Walton photo

“An excellent angler, and now with God.”

Part I, ch. 4.
The Compleat Angler (1653-1655)

M.I.A. photo

“They wanted me to be the face of Coca Cola. I was like 'Wow. Have you guys got any idea what you’re talking about?' Then Pepsi called me the next week. My mother-in-law called me and said 'Oh my God, Maya, they’re offering you so much money.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Quote on corporate sponsorship http://www.nme.com/photos/in-her-own-words-mias-20-sharpest-quotes/172930/16/4#5 reprinted in NME (2010)
Sourced quotes

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad photo

“We thank God that our enemies are idiots.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

6 February 2006
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/06/wiran06.xml&DCMP=EMC-new_06022006
2006

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Imelda Marcos photo
Russell Brand photo
James Fenimore Cooper photo

“Parson Amen's speculations on this interesting subject, although this may happen to be the first occasion on which he has ever heard the practice of taking scalps justified by Scripture. Viewed in a proper spirit, they ought merely to convey a lesson of humility, by rendering apparent the wisdom, nay the necessity, of men's keeping them-selves within the limits of the sphere of knowledge they were designed to fill, and convey, when rightly considered, as much of a lesson to the Puseyite, with abstractions that are quite as unintelligible to himself as they are to others; to the high-wrought and dogmatical Calvinist, who in the midst of his fiery zeal, forgets that love is the very essence of the relation between God and man; to the Quaker, who seems to think the cut of a coat essential to salvation; to the descendant of the Puritan, who whether he be Socinian, Calvinist, Universalist, or any other "1st," appears to believe that the "rock" on which Christ declared he would found his church was the "Rock of Plymouth"; and to the unbeliever, who, in deriding all creeds, does not know where to turn to find one to substitute in their stead. Humility, in matters of this sort, is the great lesson that all should teach and learn; for it opens the way to charity, and eventually to faith, and through both of these to hope; finally, through all of these, to heaven.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Source: Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848), Ch. XI

James Wolfe photo

“Now God be praised, I die contented.”

James Wolfe (1727–1759) British Army officer

Source: Last words, on hearing of the defeat of the French at Quebec. Quoted in Francis Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe

Mark Heard photo
Albert Barnes photo
James A. Garfield photo
Joseph Smith, Jr. photo
Dylan Moran photo

“Fruit… it's just God showing off. "Look at all the colours I know!"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Jahangir photo
Robert Boyle photo

“Doubtless, it shews the wisdom of God, to have so fram'd things at first, that there can seldom or never need any extraordinary interposition of his power; or the employing from, time to time, an intelligent overseer, to regulate, assist, and control the motions of matter.”

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) English natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor

"A Free Inquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature," Sect.1 in The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1725) Vol.2 http://books.google.com/books?id=Y-YJAAAAMAAJ

Kent Hovind photo
Kevin Kelly photo

“The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Miguel de Unamuno photo
Prem Rawat photo

“receive this Knowledge and know God within yourself. That pure energy, God, is within your own heart.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Peace Bomb satsang, 11 October 1970, India Gate, New Delhi, India (translated from Hindi)
1970s

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen photo
Charles Kingsley photo
Immortal Technique photo

“When I was a child, the Devil himself bought me a mic. But I refused the offer, 'cuz God sent me to strike, with skills unused like fallopian tubes on a dyke.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The Cause of Death
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

“A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens' imaginations.
What!?!
It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad.
Put them down in the imagination of their hearts. Their imagination is only to do evil.
Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision.
Another example of our changing language is the word, prevent. Take it apart into its Latin origin, and it is prevenire. Go before. So in the language of the King James translation if we read, "May God prevent us," we should understand the meaning to be, "God go before us," or "God lead us."
And the verb, to let, used to mean, stop. Do not let me, meant do not stop me. And now it is completely reversed into a positive, permissive word.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)

John Buchan photo
William McKinley photo

“that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

Attributed by James F. Rusling "Interview with President McKinley" The Christian Advocate (22 January 1903), as remarks from a meeting with clergymen on 21 November 1899. The overtly religious part is disputed in Lewis Gould (1980) The Presidency of William McKinley.

John Buchan photo
John Updike photo
Khaled Hosseini photo
Ludwig Feuerbach photo

“God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

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

Halldór Laxness photo

“To explain God would be to have no God, my little one.”

Ugla's father
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#64
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“How might our perception of God be changed if we turned off the radio station for a few minutes and walked in a thunderstorm?”

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

William James photo
Garth Brooks photo
Paul of Tarsus photo

“Why is it considered unbelievable among you that God raises up the dead?”

Paul of Tarsus (5–67) Early Christian apostle and missionary

26:8
Acts of the Apostles

Sören Kierkegaard photo

“He fixed his definition thus: reflection is the possibility of the relation, consciousness is the relation, the first form of which is contradiction. He soon noted that, as a result, the categories of reflection are always dichotomous. For example ideality and reality, soul and body, to recognize – the true, to will – the good, to love – the beautiful, God and the world, and so on, these are categories of reflection. In reflection, these touch each other in such a way that a relation becomes possible. The categories of consciousness, on the other hand, are trichotomous, as language itself indicates, for when I say I am conscious of this, I mention a trinity. Consciousness is mind and spirit, and the remarkable thing is that when in the world of mind or spirit one is divided, it always becomes three and never two. Consciousness, therefore, presupposes reflection. If this were not true it would be impossible to explain doubt. True, language seems to contest this, since in most languages, as far as he knew, the word ‘doubt’ is etymologically related to the word ‘two’. Yet in his opinion this only indicated the presupposition of doubt, especially because it was clear to him that as soon as I, as spirit, become two, I am eo ipso three. If there were nothing but dichotomies, doubt would not exist, for the possibility of doubt lies precisely in that third which places the two in relation to each other. One cannot therefore say that reflection produces doubt, unless one expressed oneself backwards; one must say that doubt presupposes reflection, though not in a temporal sense. Doubt arises through a relation between two, but for this to take place the two must exist, although doubt, as a higher expression, comes before rather than afterwards.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Johannes Climacus (1841) p. 80-81
1840s, Johannes Climacus (1841)

Giordano Bruno photo

“The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

IV 9; as translated by Dorothea Waley Singer (1950)
De immenso (1591)

Tim Buck photo
Mark Hopkins (educator) photo

“Whatever capacities there may be for enjoyment or for suffering in this strange being of ours, and God only knows what they are, they will be drawn out wholly in accordance with character.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 45.

Robert Stanley Weir photo
George Herbert photo

“To a close-shorn sheep God gives wind by measure.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Brian W. Aldiss photo
Patrick Swift photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Graham Greene photo
Alexander Pope photo

“Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes;
The glorious fault of Angels and of Gods.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 13.

“Since so little is known about the early Macedonians, it is hardly strange that in both ancient and modern times there has been much disagreement on their ethnic identity. The Greeks in general and Demosthenes in particular looked upon them as barbarians, that is, not Greek. Modern scholarship, after many generations of argument, now almost unanimously recognises them as Greeks, a branch of the Dorians and ‘NorthWest Greeks’ who, after long residence in the north Pindus region, migrated eastwards. The Macedonian language has not survived in any written text, but the names of individuals, places, gods, months, and the like suggest strongly that the language was a Greek dialect. Macedonian institutions, both secular and religious, had marked Hellenic characteristics and legends identify or link the people with the Dorians. During their sojourn in the Pindus complex and the long struggle to found a kingdom, however, the Macedonians fought and mingled constantly with Illyrians, Thracians, Paeonians, and probably various Greek tribes. Their language naturally acquired many Illyrian and Thracian loanwords, and some of their customs were surely influenced by their neighbours[…] To the civilised Greek of the fifth and fourth centuries, the Macedonian way of life must have seemed crude and primitive. This backwardness in culture was mainly the result of geographical factors. The Greeks, who had proceeded south in the second millennium, were affected by the many civilising influences of the Mediterranean world, and ultimately they developed that very civilising institution, the polis. The Macedonians, on the other hand, remained in the north and living for centuries in mountainous areas, fighting with Illyrians, Thracians, and amongst themselves as tribe fought tribe, developed a society that may be termed Homeric. The amenities of city-state life were unknown until they began to take root in Lower Macedonia from the end of the fifth century onwards.”

John V.A. Fine (1903–1987) American historian

"The Ancient Greeks: A Critical History", Harvard University Press, 1983, pgs 605-608

Maimónides photo

“God cannot be compared to anything. Note this.”

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.7

Thomas Brooks photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Guru Tegh Bahadur photo

“One who is not perturbed by misfortune, who is beyond comfort, attachment and fear, who considers gold as dust. He neither speaks ill of others nor feels elated by praise and shuns greed, attachments and arrogance. He is indifferent to ecstasy and tragedy, is not affected by honors or humiliations. He renounces expectations, greed. He is neither attached to the worldliness, nor lets senses and anger affect him. In such a person resides God.”

Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621–1675) The ninth Guru of Sikhism

Guru Tegh Bahadur, Sorath 633 (Translated by Gopal Singh), Tegh Bahadur (Translated by Gopal Singh) (2005). Mahalla nawan: compositions of Guru Tegh Bahādur-the ninth guru (from Sri Guru Granth Sahib): Bāṇī Gurū Tega Bahādara. Allied Publishers. pp. xxviii–xxxiii, 15–27. ISBN 978-81-7764-897-3.

Samuel Rutherford photo
Thomas Watson photo
George Gallup photo

“I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone — the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.”

George Gallup (1901–1984) American statistician

Quoted in http://books.google.com/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC&q="I+could+prove+God+statistically"&pg=PA298#v=onepage Readers Digest (October 1943)