Writing and Being (1991)
Context: In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come.
“The word of God is the creation we behold and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.”
1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
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Thomas Paine 262
English and American political activist 1737–1809Related quotes
“To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.”
Prier Dieu c'est se flatter qu'avec des paroles on changera toute la nature.
Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)
Citas
“No man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words”
Vol. II, Ch. V Aphorisms and Extracts, p. 72.
Memoirs and Correspondence (1900)
1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Context: The universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God. It is there that the proofs of his existence are to be sought and to be found. As to written or printed books, by whatever name they are called, they are the works of man's hands, and carry no evidence in themselves that God is the author of any of them. It must be in something that man could not make, that we must seek evidence for our belief, and that something is the universe; the true bible; the inimitable word, of God.
“Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.”
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…”
John 1:1; archaic spelling: In the beginnynge was the worde and the worde was with God: and the worde was God. The same was in the beginnynge with God. All thinges were made by it and with out it was made nothinge that was made. In it was lyfe and the lyfe was ye lyght of men and the lyght shyneth in the darcknes but the darcknes comprehended it not.
Tyndale's translations