“You cannot understand the glories of the universe without believing there is some Supreme Power behind it.”

From a letter to the California State board of Education (14 September 1972)
Context: For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without invoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all.

As quoted in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 293.
1930s

The Purpose of Life, p. 53
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (2002)

Section 4, member 1, subsection 2, Causes of Religious melancholy. From the Devil by miracles, apparitions, oracles. His instruments or factors, politicians, Priests, Impostors, Heretics, blind guides. In them simplicity, fear, blind zeal, ignorance, solitariness, curiosity, pride, vainglory, presumption, &c. his engines, fasting, solitariness, hope, fear, etc.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III

The Rights of the Colonists (1772)

As quoted in Calgary Sun (10 July 2007)

"The Power and the Glory"
Lyrics

Source: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 101 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA101
Context: We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning.