GOD QUOTES VI
quotations about God
God is to be believed in so far as he speaks of his gun.
ANNE CARSON
Decreation
The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Evolutionary Agents
The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering.... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection.
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Calculating God
Each man creates god in his own image.
MORDECAI RICHLER
Son of a Smaller Hero
All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of him but in broken and imperfect words. High above all he sits, sublimer than mountains, grander than storms, sweeter than blossoms and tender fruits, nobler than lords, truer than parents, more loving than lovers. His feet tread the lowest places of the earth; but his head is above all glory, and everywhere he is supreme.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The existence of the world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.
ARMAND SALACROU
attributed, Certitudes et Incertitudes
I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.
ANNE CARSON
The Paris Review, fall 2004
The best notion we can conceive of God, may be, that he is to the creation what the soul is to the body.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
God Himself has no right to be a tyrant.
WILLIAM GODWIN
Sketches of History
I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.
WILHELM REICH
Listen
When we say that God is infinite, we do not mean that He is of immeasurable size and duration, but that He is beyond all space and time. He is neither in space nor in time; for this reason He is eternal and infinite, and therefore He is also incomprehensible.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
lecture, Nov. 18, 1862
God is a thought which makes crooked all that is straight.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spake Zarathustra
It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion, as is unworthy of him. For the one is unbelief, the other is contumely; and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity. Plutarch saith well to that purpose: Surely (saith he) I had rather a great deal, men should say, there was no such man at all, as Plutarch, than that they should say, that there was one Plutarch, that would eat his children as soon as they were born; as the poets speak of Saturn. And as the contumely is greater towards God, so the danger is greater towards men. Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy, in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Caesar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Superstition", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
Though cares and sorrows e'er must come,
Though heart be rent,
I know that God will give me strength,
When mine is spent.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"The Peace That Passeth Understanding"
As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophical Writings of Annie Besant
Soul of the universe, Sire, God, Creator,
Lord, I believe in Thee, 'neath all these names:
And without having need to hear thy word,
In the sky's brow my glorious creed I trace.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Prayer", Poetical Meditations
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
History of Woman Suffrage
No man will find God unless he seeks after God for God's own sake, loves him for himself, and not for the gifts which he may bestow.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God