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Quotations about God
We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. ~Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851
She does not know the calm and peace found in a quiet chapel—
Yet she knows God; her every waking moment is an unconscious prayer.
~Rosabelle Houston, "A Woman of the Soil"
We have not by searching found out God. The trees do not search for the sun. They live and move and have their being in him. So we live in the Father. To know God by life is like knowing health by being well. ~Rev. James Henry Ecob, D.D. (1844–1921), "The Gospel for the Twentieth Century," 1901
God is in the hearts of all, and they that seek shall surely find Him when they need Him most. ~Louisa May Alcott, "Through the Mist," Work: A Story of Experience, 1873
If God had wanted to be a big secret, He would not have created babbling brooks and whispering pines. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
How do I know that God is good? I don't.
I gamble like a man. I bet my life.
Upon one side of life's great war. I must,
I can't stand out. I must take sides. The man
Who is a neutral in this fight is not
A man. He's bulk and body without breath...
A fool. Weak tea!... I want to live, live out...
I must have God... I'd drink myself blind drunk,
And see blue snakes if I could not look up
To see blue skies, and hear God speaking through
The silence of the stars. How is it proved?
It isn't proved, you fool, it can't be proved.
How can you prove a victory before
It's won?...
~G. A. Studdert Kennedy, "Faith," The Sorrows of God and Other Poems, 1924
How tired God must be of guilt and loneliness, for that is all we ever bring to Him. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
You, the child, ensphered in the eternal
You and I are children of the twentieth century. We are the twentieth century. When we have answered the question, What is the best news to me? we have found the gospel for the century. Now come with your heart up to date in all the wisdom and folly and mystery of this last day of the world, and answer me truly, What word solidifies, clarifies, and unifies your knowledge; what word rebukes and chastens and corrects your folly; what word cries like God, through the darkness and chaos of mystery, "Let there be light"? Is it not Father, my Father?
Come with the very latest twentieth-century riddles and misgivings, and revelations and prophecies, and visions and despairs. And this one word, old as eternity, new as the day, will answer your soul, deep unto deep — Father. ~Rev. James Henry Ecob, D.D. (1844–1921), "The Gospel for the Twentieth Century," 1901
I cannot go so far that God will not go with me. I started on my desolate way, and I found that God had strapped on his knapsack, and taken up his staff. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912
And how can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? ~Woody Allen, "Selections from the Allen Notebooks," 1973
In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all. It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
I will let God flow unimpeded through me. Unimpeded through me! A channel choked with a lifetime of debris, of wrecked and broken years, tangled hours and intentions. Not room for God, not room for me! ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "A Soul's Faring: XI," A Soul's Faring, 1921
If you don't know what's meant by God, watch a forsythia branch or a lettuce leaf sprout. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
That is the light which lighteth every man coming into the world. The sun sees all his planets forever on the illuminated side. The divine
God possess me!
Express through me as through the hues of your flowers, the songs of your starlings.
Vest me with brilliant hues, or with carols.
Let me be some color of your soul, some sound of your uttering...
~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "At the Roots of Grasses: XXVIII," At the Roots of Grasses, 1923
We look into the reverse end of the kaleidoscope of human events and see, mostly, confusion and discord; while God beholds harmony from the divine end. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. ~Pat Alger, Larry Bastian, and Garth Brooks, "Unanswered Prayers"
Do you believe in God? Perhaps you aren't old enough. The reason old people believe in God is because they've given up believing in anything else, and one can't exist without faith in something.... God is a sort of burglar. As a young man you knock him down; as an old man, you try to conciliate him because he may knock you down. Moral: don't grow old. ~Herbert Beerbohm Tree, as quoted by Hesketh Pearson ("Sir Herbert Tree," Modern Men and Mummers)
I could believe only in a God who would know how to dance. ~Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), "Of Reading and Writing," Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, translated from the German by Alexander Tille, 1896
Alone with God! Day's craven cares
Have crowded onward, unawares.
The soul is left to breathe her prayers...
Alone with God! No human eye
Is here, with eager look, to pry
Into the meaning of each sigh...
Alone with God! He only knows,
If sorrow's ocean overflows,
The silent spring from whence it rose...
Alone with God! Still nearer bend,
O tender Father; condescend,
In this my need, to be my friend...
Alone with God! Oh sweet to me
This cover, to whose shades I flee,
To breathe repose in Thee, in Thee.
~Mary Clemmer (1831–1884), "Alone with God"
How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
God enters by a private door into every individual. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
In nature we see where God has been. In our fellow man, we see where He is still at work. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To tell the love of God alone
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
~Author unknown, quoted in "Fly-leaf Inscriptions," The Honey Jar: A Receptacle for Literary Preserves, 1900 May 15th
We are imprisoned here, but we can hear God talking beyond the cell-bars. ~Austin O'Malley, Keystones of Thought, 1914
All are but parts of one stupendous Whole:
Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul.
~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
~Robert Browning
...the Poet of poets — God. ~Sister Mary Blanche (Elizabeth King, b.1852), "Winter Moonlight," Idyls and Sketches, 1916
The universe is just God, struggling to create Himself. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
When you knock, ask to see God, — none of the servants. ~Henry David Thoreau
Your mind works very simply: you are either trying to find out what are God's laws in order to follow them; or you are trying to outsmart Him. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Some stand on tiptoe trying to get closer to talk with God. Drop to your knees and listen — he will hear you better that way. ~Terri Guillemets
Today, I wandered through the fields
Where buttercups and daisies grew;
My Spirit loved ones went with me,
And God was there; all this I knew!
I saw Him in the sunny sky
And in the flowers at my feet;
I heard His voice in songs of birds
Upon the wing, so pure and sweet!
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham (1880–1971), "One Happy, Joyous Hour"
The self-appointed spokesmen for God incline to shout; He, Himself, speaks only in whispers. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
So long as God reveals Himself, or doesn't, He is behaving like God. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1963
And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least...
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
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 others will punctually come forever and ever.
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
I don't believe you really know God if you do not recognize His sense of humor. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
A man may hear God in a crowd; but he certainly will not until he forgets the crowd. ~G. Campbell Morgan, "Abram, Called of God," in Mid-Winter Bible Conference Echoes: A Book of Sermons and Addresses, 1914
After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility? ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), translated by Norman Alliston, 1908
How long, God, did you agonize, before the atoms became a tangibility? How long before the mist condensed and ran in rivers to the sea? ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "Songs of Longing: XI," At the Roots of Grasses, 1923
Each time we take a step toward God we discover that He has already taken two steps toward us. ~William Arthur Ward, Thoughts of a Christian Optimist, 1968
'T is heaven alone that is given away,
'T is only God may be had for the asking...
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal
The earth is not Beauty, Love, Divinity itself; it is but the shadow of God. ~Daniel J. MacDonald, 1912, paraphrasing Percy Bysshe Shelley
The finite is the shadow of God. ~Plotinus
Beauty is the shadow of God... ~Thomas Clark Henley, "Beauty," 1851
If Creation were a crime, would not God be the prime suspect? ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
We are Godseekers all, though some be churchgoing believers and others pilgrims to an unknown shrine. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Whether my days are cooled with calm
or filled with fever's ardent taint,
I have the same blue sky as God,
I have the same God as the saint.
~Frederic Ridgely Torrence, The House of a Hundred Lights: A Psalm of Experience After Reading a Couplet of Bidpai, 1899
What skeptic has not, in the dark of despair,
In some nighttime of anguish or grief,
Dispatched from his heart a questing prayer
To the God of his disbelief?
~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Do not, Daughter, lose faith in the noble health of youth; for when God on high sends the wound, he follows with the remedy. ~La Celestina, 1499, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, 2009
I am man the container, with God pouring into me like a stream. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "Songs of the Strong: VI," A Soul's Faring, 1921
The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy. The lonely pine on the mountain top waves its sombre boughs and cries, "Thou art my sun." And the little meadow violet lifts its cups of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, "Thou art my sun." And the grain in a thousand fields rustles in the wind, and makes answer, "Thou art my sun."
So God sits, effulgent in heaven, not for a favoured few, but for the universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or so low that he may not look up with childlike confidence and say, "My Father! thou art mine." ~Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887)
May the light of God's love shine upon you
And guide you where ere you may be;
Making lighter Earth's burdens and sorrows,
And keep your Soul joyous and free.
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, 1948
There is a tendency to see divine intervention in things that happen in the normal course of miracles. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
To know the disillusionments of life, and to come enchanted still.
To break all its glass balls, and then to find that life did not lie in the glass balls.
To have all my idols shattered, and then to find God in the earth at their base.
~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "A Soul's Faring: LXXXI," A Soul's Faring, 1921
I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that... It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean. ~J.D. Salinger, "Teddy"
I will walk with God in the garden;
I will walk with Him on the street;
I will see Him in all that's lovely;
He'll be with me when friends I greet.
I'll see Him in flowers and woodland,
In the moon, the stars and the sun;
I will hear His voice in the meadows
When the work of each day is done.
~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "I Will Walk With God," 1940s
God gave moonbeams and fragrant eventide air; hung a wall of trailing arbutus against the sky and banked long cliffs of purple shadows against the grey, gold-shot twilight; hung purple grapes in the vineyard; scattered His prodigal soul like a wedding feast over the world. ~Muriel Strode (1875–1964), "Prayers of a Worldling: IV," A Soul's Faring, 1921 [a little altered
God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home. ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, translated from French by Isabel F. Hapgood
My theology, briefly,
Is that the Universe
Was Dictated
But not Signed.
~Christopher Morley, "Safe and Sane"
Nature drives a man to belief in something, or rather some one, behind it all. The basis of religion is Nature worship. H. G. Wells wants me to give up wondering who made the world, because it has nothing to do with religion, being a purely scientific question. What a comic person he is... He could never write poetry or really understand religion; they are both too primitive...
You cannot leave Nature out of religion when you love it, and all natural men do. The natural man's first argument for God is always flowers or trees or brussels sprouts or something. You have to worship Nature or the Maker of it. It calls you. You are part of it. You draw your very life, your power to worship and adore, from the vitals of this poor battered earth. Nature means well, and the beauty of its million colours and the music of its million sounds just pull your heart-strings and you have to worship...
You can't leave Nature out. It's like telling a man to leave out his heart and lop along with his liver. Nature is one of God's fruits by which we have to know Him. I know it is hard to see in Nature what God is; its many voices seem to contradict one another. Its tenderness and cruelty, its order and its chaos, its beauty and its ugliness, make discords in its song and mar the music of its message to the soul of man...
Nevertheless, the heart of the ordinary man will always turn away from these things and come back to the glory of a summer dawn and worship the Maker of it. ~G. A. Studdert Kennedy, "God In Nature," The Hardest Part, 1919
Here is God's purpose —
for God, to me it seems,
is a verb —
not a noun,
proper or improper...
~R. Buckminster Fuller
Men are the facets of God; each focuses all the colors of his spectrum. ~Elizabeth Jones Towne, "Evolution and the Absolute, and Perpetual Life," 15 Lessons in New Thought, 1921
I felt that God was in the mist last night,
The golden mist that covered all the world,
And something stirred within me, and I rose
And kissed the wondrous beauty that I felt.
I seemed to wander forth, enwrapped in it,
To find God's hand, and press it to my heart.
Then wandered we together He and I,
Into the golden mist of heaven on earth.
~Mary K. Minor, "Night"
There can be no doubt that in some respects we were surpassed in wisdom by devout men who lived when a small district, sparsely inhabited, seemed to be a world. They knew less of the machinery of the universe than we know, but they saw more clearly its motive power; and the love, the trust, the adoration which they displayed far surpassed in dignity the self-glorification of the modern scientist, who after a short life-time of learning and investigation, stands on his little ant-hill of knowledge, and looking round him exclaims, "I know the world, and I can see no God in it." ~Alfred Rowland, "The Clouds: God's Angels of the Sea," in The Sunday Magazine (London), 1884 [Fully cited author name: The Rev. Alfred Rowland, LL.B., B.A. American Rev. Edward G. Porter said of him in 1899, "Much of the wheat of England was sifted to make New England, but not all of it. Very much remained in the homeland. We have had in this Council many gentlemen who represent what that faith is in England and Scotland and Wales to‑day. We are glad to have with us as the representative of the sentiment, 'The Pilgrim who Stayed in Old England,' Rev. Alfred Rowland, of London."
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues. ~Edward Abbey
Life is a tapestry: We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver. Only the Weaver sees the whole design. ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994
[T]hose who've never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all. ~Catherine Marshall, Christy, 1967 (Miss Alice to Christy)
I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter. But even Abraham Lincoln returned from Gettysburg murmuring that he had forgotten the things he Really Wanted to Say. ~Christopher Morley, Inward Ho!, 1923
As I may or may not say to the Lord on Judgment Day, "You ask a lot of questions for someone who has so much explaining to do." ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
God is a child who amuses himself, passes from laughter to tears without reason, and every day invents the world for the torment of the abstractors of its quintessence, the pedants, and the preachers who pretend to teach him his trade of creator. ~Élie Faure (1873-1937), Histoire de l'art: L'Esprit des formes, 1927, translated from French by Walter Pach (History of Art: The Spirit of the Forms)
This is Daddy's bedtime secret for to-day: Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue! ~Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), The Great God Brown, 1926
I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that He has a sense of humour. ~William Ralph Inge
What is it that we all believe in that we cannot see or hear or feel or taste or smell — this invisible thing that heals all sorrows, reveals all lies and renews all hope? What is it that has always been and always will be, from whose bosom we all came and to which we will all return? Most call it Time. A few realize that it is God. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
God left so many fingerprints at the scene of Creation that you wonder — does He want to be found, or does He want to be stopped? ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
By the grace of pataphysics, two telepathic letters from the Doctor to Lord Kelvin, and some geometrical equations, we are instructed that the exception is more reliable than the rule, imagination more accurate than fact, poetry more authentic than life, that Man is God, and God is the Tangential Point Between Zero and Infinity. ~Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, translated from French (Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician), published posthumously, 1911
You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind? ~Freeman Dyson, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead
Einstein said, "God does not play dice with the world." Now if the dice would only stop playing God. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
If I could create the world again I'd do it sober. ~@TheTweetOfGod, tweet, 2018
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