Quotations and Poems

» “I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”
– Maya Angelou

» “With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it’s not just a trick of the devil.”
– Jean Anouilh

» “”God is Love,” we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.”
– W. H. Auden

» “God brings men into deep waters not to drown them, but to cleanse them.”
– John H. Aughey

» “I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within.”
– St. Augustine

» “I went to the root of things, and found nothing but Him alone.”
– Mira Bai

» “People see God every day; they just don’t recognize Him.”
– Pearl Bailey

» “We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.”
– Natalie Clifford Barney

» “To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.”
– Georges Bataille

» “How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.”
– Samuel Beckett

» “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. [I Corinthians]“
– Bible

» “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent; has he not said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good? [Numbers 23:19]“
– Bible

» “And now Israel, what does the Lord your God require from you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. [Deuteronomy 10:12]“
– Bible

» “But from there you will seek the Lord you God and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul. [Deuteronomy 4:29]“
– Bible

» “Oh the depth of both the wisdom and riches of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways beyond understanding.”
– Bible

» “A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

» “What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin

» “To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!”
– Andre Breton

» “All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don’t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.”
– Anita Brookner

» “God hears no more than the heart speaks; and if the heart be dumb, God will certainly be deaf.”
– Thomas Brooks

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

» “If someone were to prove to me — right this minute — that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn’t change a single aspect of my behavior.”
– Luis Bunuel

» “I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.”
– William S. Burroughs

» “As you know, God is generally on the side of the big squadrons against the small ones.”
– Comte De Bussy-Rabutin

» “If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.”
– Samuel Butler

» “The one thing that a fish can never find is water; and the one thing that man can never find is God.”
– Eric Butterworth

» “Fundamentalists believe Jesus was God becoming man. I believe that Jesus was man becoming God.”
– Eric Butterworth

» “God can only do for you what He can do through you.”
– Eric Butterworth

» “Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.”
– Elias Canetti

» “Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”
– Angela Carter

» “When I was young, I said to God, god, tell me the mystery of the universe. But God answered, that knowledge is for me alone. So I said, god, tell me the mystery of the peanut. Then God said, well, George, that’s more nearly your size.”
– George Washington Carver

» “The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.”
– Richard Cecil

» “Man appoints, and God disappoints.”
– Miguel De Cervantes

» “Though God’s attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice.”
– Miguel De Cervantes

» “If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.”
– Winston Churchill

» “A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”
– E. M. Cioran

» “God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.”
– E. M. Cioran

» “All the gods are dead except the god of war.”
– Eldridge Cleaver

» “It is not a difficult matter to learn what it means to delight ourselves in the Lord. It is to live so as to please Him, to honor everything we find in His Word, to do everything the way He would like to have it done, and for Him.”
– S. Maxwell Coder

» “There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.”
– Cyril Connolly

» “We may seek God by our intellect, but we only can find him with our heart.”
– Cotvos

» “If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.”
– Mary Daly

» “Why indeed must ”God” be a noun? Why not a verb — the most active and dynamic of all.”
– Mary Daly

» “In His will is our peace.”
– Dante Alighieri

» “One and God make a majority.”
– Frederick Douglass

» “To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.”
– Meister Eckhart

» “God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk.”
– Meister Eckhart

» “Jesus might have said, ”I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.””
– Meister Eckhart

» “Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door.”
– Meister Eckhart

» “The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.”
– Meister Eckhart

» “God is subtle, but He is not malicious. I cannot believe that God plays dice with the world.”
– Albert Einstein

» “God does not play dice with the universe.”
– Albert Einstein

» “God is clever, but not dishonest.”
– Albert Einstein

» “The dice of God are always loaded.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “There is a crack in everything God has made.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “‘Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “God hath entrusted me with myself.”
– Epictetus

» “And some to Meccah turn to pray, and I toward thy bed, Yasmin.”
– James Elroy Flecker

» “The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”
– Sigmund Freud

» “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee and I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.”
– Robert Frost

» “God is a verb.”
– Buckminster Fuller

» “Here is God’s purpose — for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller

» “The mantram becomes one’s staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

» “God is more concerned about who you are than what you do, and He is more concerned about what you do than where you do it.”
– Gary Gulbranson

» “God is concerned with nations, but nations also need to be concerned with God. No nation can have a monopoly on God, but God will bless any nation whose people seek and honor His will as revealed by Christ and declared through the Holy Spirit.”
– John Haggai

» “The only way God could impose peace on the world would be to robotize our wills and rob every human being of the power of choice. He has not chosen to do that. He has given every person a free will.”
– John Haggai

» “Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself.”
– H. R. Haweis

» “God has been so lavish in his gifts that you can lose some priceless ones, the equivalent of whole kingdoms, and still be indecently rich,”
– Wilfrid Heed

» “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.”
– Heraclitus

» “Throw away thy rod, throw away thy wrath; O my God, take the gentle path.”
– George Herbert

» “To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.”
– Eric Hoffer

» “Having given us the package, do you think God will deny us the ribbon?”
– Oswald C. Hoffman

» “I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.”
– R. J. Hollingdale

» “Providence certainly does not favor just certain individuals, but the deep wisdom of its counsel, instruction and ennoblement extends to all.”
– Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

» “Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.”
– William James

» “God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.”
– Alfred Jarry

» “Abide in peace, banish cares, take no account of all that happens, and you will serve God according to his good pleasure and rest in him.”
– St. John of the Cross

» “We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.”
– Joseph Joubert

» “Don’t think so much about who is for or against you, rather give all your care, that God be with you in everything you do.”
РThomas ̣ Kempis

» “He does much who loves God much, and he does much who does his deed well, and he does his deed well who does it rather for the common good than for his own will.”
РThomas ̣ Kempis

» “Man proposes, but God disposes.”
РThomas ̣ Kempis

» “The intention which is fixed on God as its only end will keep people steady in their purposes, and deliver them from being the joke and scorn of fortune.”
РThomas ̣ Kempis

» “There is no God but God.”
– The Koran

» “Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man.”
– Johann Kaspar Lavater

» “Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.”
– William Law

» “God is only a great imaginative experience.”
– D. H. Lawrence

» “I cannot be a materialist — but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery — such suffering, such dreadful suffering — and shall the short years of Christ’s mission atone for it all?”
– D. H. Lawrence

» “God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.”
– Irving Layton

» “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
– John Lennon

» “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.”
– C. S. Lewis

» “It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.”
– Abraham Lincoln

» “Has it ever struck you that the vast majority of the will of God for your life has already been revealed in the Bible? That is a crucial thing to grasp.”
– Paul Little

» “I was frustrated out of my mind, trying to figure out the will of God. I was doing everything but getting into the presence of God and asking Him to show me.”
– Paul Little

» “Others think it’s a choice between doing what we want to do and being happy, and doing what God wants us to do and being miserable.”
– Paul Little

» “Some people think that God peers over the balcony of heaven trying to find anybody who is enjoying life. And when He spots a happy person, He yells, ”Now cut that out!” That concept of God should make us shudder because it’s blasphemous!”
– Paul Little

» “The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.”
– Martin Luther

» “I find that doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.”
– George Macdonald

» “Seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.”
– Alexander Maclaren

» “Man is a dog’s ideal of what God should be.”
– Andre Malraux

» “Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things, but each according to its nature, and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.”
– Joseph De Maistre

» “God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.”
– H. L. Mencken

» “When we want to know God’s will, there are three things which always concur: the inward impulse, the Word of God and the trend of circumstances. Never act until these three things agree.”
– F. B. Meyer

» “God, I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on Thy heart.”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

» “To honor him whom we have made is far from honoring him that hath made us..”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

» “If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.”
– Charles De Montesquieu

» “I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”
– Mother Teresa

» “If the Lord be with us, we have no cause of fear. His eye is upon us, His arm over us, His ear open to our prayer–His grace sufficient, His promises unchangeable.”
– John Newton

» “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “Is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s blunders?”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are — more humane.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “Suddenly is the soul oned to God when it is truly peaced in itself: for in Him is found no wrath. And thus I saw when we are all in peace and in love, we find no contrariness, nor no manner of letting through that contrariness which is now in us.”
– Julian of Norwich

» “When men make gods, there is no God!”
– Eugene O’Neill

» “God has been pleased to prescribe limits to his power and to work out his ends within these limits.”
– William Paley

» “Two men please God — who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not.”
– Nikita Ivanovich Panin

» “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation, that He exists.”
– Blaise Pascal

» “Without God there is for mankind no purpose, no goal, no hope, only a wavering future, an eternal dread of every darkness.”
– Jean Paul

» “There will be no peace so long as God remains unseated at the conference table.”
– William M. Peck

» “Men must be governed by God, or they will be ruled by tyrants.”
– William Penn

» “It is fear that first brought gods into the world.”
– Petronius

» “One on God’s side is a majority.”
– Wendell Phillips

» “Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men..”
– Francis Picabia

» “God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “You are within God. God is within you.”
– Peace Pilgrim

» “God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.”
– Plotinus

» “Man does what he can, God does what he will.”
– Proverb

» “God is closest to those with broken hearts.”
– Jewish Proverb

» “If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
– Jewish Proverb

» “What men usually ask for when they pray to God is, that two and two may not make four.”
– Russian Proverb

» “Forsake not God till you find a better master.”
– Scottish Proverb

» “Every man for himself and God for us all.”
– Spanish Proverb

» “God will provide — ah, if only He would till He does!”
– Yiddish Proverb

» “If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be spent before the Words of my lord are spent.”
– Qur’an

» “The grace of God is a wind which is always blowing.”
– Sri Ramakrishna

» “People do not know what the Name of God can do. Those who repeat it constantly alone know its power. It can purify our mind completely… The Name can take us to the summit of spiritual experience.”
– Swami Ramdas

» “Place yourself as an instrument in the hands of God, who does his own work in his own way.”
– Swami Ramdas

» “God always has another custard pie up his sleeve.”
– Lynn Redgrave

» “And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! — But the great Faith is Love!”
– Arthur Rimbaud

» “God, that checkroom of our dreams.”
– Jean Rostand

» “God, that dumping ground of our dreams.”
– Jean Rostand

» “I fear God and next to God I mostly fear them that fear him not.”
– Saadi

» “Among the attributes of God, although they are equal, mercy shines with even more brilliance than justice.”
– Miguel De Cervantes

» “If we really think about it, God exists for any single individual who puts his trust in Him, not for the whole of humanity, with its laws, its organizations, and its violence. Humanity is the demon which God does not succeed in destroying.”
– Salvatore Satta

» “You have to believe in gods to see them.”
– Hopi Indian saying

» “While the womanly god demands our veneration, the godlike woman kindles our love; but while we allow ourselves to melt in the celestial loveliness, the celestial self-sufficiency holds us back in awe.”
– Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

» “Nothing is void of God, his work is everywhere his full of himself.”
– Seneca

» “To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “I’m one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.”
– Martin Sheen

» “God is the name we give our conscience.”
– Nader Shureih

» “I like to interpose in all of my appointments, if the Lord wills.”
– A. B. Simpson

» “Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn’t a God.”
– Logan Pearsall Smith

» “I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body.”
– Lucy Stone

» “God has marvelous ways of taking our worst tragedies and turning them into His most glorious triumphs.”
– Joseph Stowell

» “It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument — their intellect — which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.”
– Galen Strawson

» “Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God’s dust is greater than your idol.”
– Rabindranath Tagore

» “God is infinite and without end, but the soul’s desire is an abyss which cannot be filled except by a Good which is infinite; and the more ardently the soul longeth after God, the more she wills to long after him; for God is a Good without drawback, and a well of living water without bottom, and the soul is made in the image of God, and therefore it is created to know and love God.”
– Johannes Tauler

» “It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.”
– Henry David Thoreau

» “I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.”
– Paul Tillich

» “If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch?”
– A. W. Tozer

» “What I believe about God is the most important thing about me.”
– A. W. Tozer

» “The man or woman who is wholly or joyously surrendered to Christ can’t make a wrong choice–any choice will be the right one.”
– A. W. Tozer

» “An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.”
– A. W. Tozer

» “In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we’re pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker’s praise without anxiety.”
– A. W. Tozer

» “People are too apt to treat God as if he were a minor royalty.”
– Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree

» “To know the will of God is the greatest knowledge! To do the will of God is the greatest achievement.”
– George W. Truett

» “We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.”
– Miguel De Unamuno

» “Blessed is the man who finds out which way God is moving and then gets going in the same direction.”
– Source Unknown

» “If you find yourself further from God than you were yesterday, you can be sure who has moved.”
– Source Unknown

» “The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”
– John Updike

» “Each person, makes their own terrible passion their God.”
– Virgil

» “God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions.”
– Voltaire

» “God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.”
– Voltaire

» “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
– Voltaire

» “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.”
– Voltaire

» “The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.”
– Alice Walker

» “The most important thought that ever occupied my mind is that of my individual responsibility to God.”
– Daniel Webster

» “In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; Form the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it.”
– Simone Weil

» “It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.”
– Simone Weil

» “We can only know one thing about God — that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.”
– Simone Weil

» “In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name. And I leave them where they are, for I know that wherever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.”
– Walt Whitman

» “I rarely speak about God. To God, yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But to open a discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.”
– Elie Wiesel

» “God gets you to the plate, but once your there your on your own.”
– Ted Williams

» “All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.”
– Tennessee Williams

» “If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.”
– Zig Ziglar