Quotes about God
Most popular God quotes
God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.
Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs, or anything else—God is in this person's life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
If we—all of us—accept the grace of Jesus Christ, he changes our heart and from sinners makes us saints. To become holy we do not need to turn our eyes away and look somewhere else, or have as it were the face on a holy card! No, no, that is not necessary. To become saints only one thing is necessary: to accept the grace that the Father gives us in Jesus Christ. There, this grace changes our heart. We continue to be sinners for we are weak, but with this grace which makes us feel that the Lord is good, that the Lord is merciful, that the Lord waits for us, that the Lord pardons us—this immense grace that changes our heart.
Before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us, to see God in others and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others.
Men make the gods; women worship them.
God is the only comfort. He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.
When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.
But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
It's not a question of God "sending" us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.
It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.
Those virtues which cost us dear prove that we love God; those which are easy to us prove that He loves us.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Rejoice in the LORD always. I will say it again: Rejoice!
Let your gentleness be evident to all. The LORD is near.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
There's a reason they call God a presence—because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.
Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.
The only difference between you and God is that you have forgotten you are divine.
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
I am here only to be truly helpful.I am here to represent Him Who sent me. I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, because He Who sent me will direct me. I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me. I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.
... say something like, "Father, I want to thank You that my payday is coming. You said no good thing will You withhold, because I walk uprightly. And I believe even right now You are arranging things in my favor."
The Creator of the universe is directing my steps. He has me in the palm of His hands. And even though this is difficult, I know it's just a matter of time before it turns around. I know my payday is coming.
God is in complete control. So be a prisoner of hope. Get up each day expecting His favor. When negative thoughts come and your burden seems so heavy you feel discouraged, just keep telling yourself: "I'm closer than I think. Right now the Creator of the universe is lining up things in my favor: the right people, the right breaks, the right opportunities."
Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
God uses every possible means to communicate with you. The wonders of nature call to you. The promises and prophecies of Scripture speak to you. God himself reaches out to you. He wants to help you find your way home.
God is always near us. Always for us. Always in us. We may forget him, but God will never forget us.
In God's hands intended evil becomes eventual good.
Don't equate the presence of God with a good mood or a pleasant temperament. God is near whether you are happy or not. Sometimes you have to take your feelings outside and give them a good talking-to.
When God gives an assignment, he also gives the skill. Study your skills, then, to reveal your assignment.
Sustaining grace promises not the absence of struggle but the presence of God.
Trust God's hold on you more than your hold on God. His faithfulness does not depend on yours. His performance is not predicated on yours. His love is not contingent on your own. Your candle may flicker, but it will not expire.
If there is no God, everything is permissible.
We speak. He listens. He speaks. We listen. This is prayer in its purest form. God changes his people through such moments.
Prayer is simply a heartfelt conversation between God and his child. My friend, he wants to talk with you. Even now, as you read these words, he taps at the door. Open it. Welcome him in. Let the conversation begin.
Good days. Bad days. God is in all days.
God surrounds us like the Pacific surrounds an ocean floor pebble. He is everywhere: above, below, on all sides.
You will never go where God is not.
Don't equate the presence of God with a good mood or a pleasant temperament. God is near whether you are happy or not.
God is at work in each of us, whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not.
This season in which you find yourself may puzzle you, but it does not bewilder God.
He is the Potter; we are the clay. He is the Shepherd; we are the sheep.
God will use your struggle for good.
If God can make a prince out of a prisoner, don't you think he can make something good out of your struggle?
We cannot always see what God is doing, but can't we assume he is up to something good?
God gives hope because he gives us himself. He wants us to know we are never alone.
Do you recite your woes more naturally than you do heaven's strength? If so, no wonder life is tough. You're assuming God isn't in this crisis. He is.
I don't have an easy solution or a magic wand. I have found something—Someone—far better. God himself.
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Hope will accompany us through our uncertain tomorrows if we will receive, by faith, the God of hope.
We trespass against God when we depend on self-sufficiency instead of practicing faith in God, self-will instead of submission to God, and self-seeking instead of serving God.
The point is this: as an old man Barzillai couldn't do everything he once did — but he did what he could, and God used his efforts. The same can be true of us as we grow older.
In God's eyes every legitimate work has dignity and importance, which means we should do our work with pride and diligence and integrity. But our work was never meant to become the center of our lives. That place belongs only to God, and when we allow our work to dominate and control us, then it has become an idol to us — and that is wrong.
What Naturalism cannot accept is the idea of a God who stands outside Nature and made it.
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
But we must remember that it's possible to affirm the existence of God with your lips and deny his existence with your life.
This verse is a call, not to a feeling, but to a decision and a deeply rooted confidence that God exists, that he is in control, and that he is good.
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.
It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, and to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in Holy Scripture, and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If he has a place and work for me and I think He has I believe I am ready.
Would God show His will for me to others and not to me?
The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression can not be restrained. In the midst of this, however, He, from Whom all blessings flow, must not be forgotten. A call for a national thanksgiving is being prepared, and will be duly promulgated.
Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God.
If you love God, you can't love only some of his children.
Allah is the Greatest. I'm just the greatest boxer.
We all have the same God, we just serve him differently.
If the Lord did not forgive everything, the world would not exist.
God, when He looks at our fragility, invites us to tend to it not with fear, but with audacity.
What God cares about most is that we are His friends.
We can say, without being irreverent: there isn't anyone more "inefficient" than God.
God is not like the idols, who have ears but don't listen. He's not like the powerful, who listen only to what they wish. He listens to everything ... and He doesn't just listen; He loves to listen.
If we close the door of our heart in His face, God suffers. Even though He's used to it, He suffers. And we lose the opportunity for Him to make us happy.
![God isn't a kind of Andreani [UPS or FedEx], sending messages all the time. - Pope Francis quote.](/img/q/48/12548A-god-isnt-a-kind-of-andreani-ups-or-fedex-sending-pope-francis.png)
God isn't a kind of Andreani [UPS or FedEx], sending messages all the time.
When a man guards his gift and doesn't do his work, he doesn't fulfill his mandate and remains primitive; when he is overly enthusiastic about his work, he forgets his gift and creates a constructivist ethic: he believes everything is the fruit of his own hands and that there is no gift.
![He doesn't promise riches or power, but what He does promise is His care and the greatest security you can find: refuge in the name of God. He promises His intimacy, the warmth of the Father, [and] His embrace, full of tenderness and understanding. - Pope Francis quote.](/img/q/50/12550A-he-doesnt-promise-riches-or-power-but-what-he-does-pope-francis.png)
He doesn't promise riches or power, but what He does promise is His care and the greatest security you can find: refuge in the name of God. He promises His intimacy, the warmth of the Father, [and] His embrace, full of tenderness and understanding.
We human beings have a complex relationship with the world in which we live, precisely because of our dual condition of being children of the earth and children of God.
The measure of every human being is God, not money.
The word of God always offers a choice: convert and ask for help and more light, or close and cling even more tightly to your chains and darkness.
No man can be called friendless when he has God and the companionship of good books.
I see God in every human being.
Prayer is when you talk to God; meditation is when you listen to God.
If you begin to live life looking for the God that is all around you, every moment becomes a prayer.
God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes but everybody who looks at it sees something different.
Get down on your knees and thank God you are on your feet.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
The finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment.
Our rabbi once said, "God always answers our prayers, it's just that sometimes the answer is no."
If you are not as close to God as you used to be, who moved?
It is good enough to talk of God while we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon, but how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day? To them God can only appear as bread and butter.
When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God.
Our Creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them unless we were meant to be immortal.
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone but in every leaf of springtime.
Science cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is the explanation for the miracle of existence —why there is something instead of nothing.
The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind—a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house.
![Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don't. I think it's fifty-fifty maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of—maybe it's 'cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on. [after a pause]... Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone. [another pause] And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices. - Steve Jobs quote.](/img/q/46/15546A-sometimes-i-believe-in-god-sometimes-i-dont-i-think-steve-jobs.png)
Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don't. I think it's fifty-fifty maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of—maybe it's 'cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on. [after a pause]... Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone. [another pause] And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.
And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?
God does not play dice with the universe.
The Kingdom of God is within you.
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
When I am alone, God knocks on the door and says, "We need to talk."
All great works of art are "about God" in the sense that they show the perplexed human being the path, the way up the mountain.
Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
I always say I am a little pencil in God's hands. He does the thinking. He does the writing.
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is another childish, but also universal, corruption of religion. This is the source of all religious fanaticism.
When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.
When we say God is a spirit, we know what we mean, as well as we do when we say that the pyramids of Egypt are matter. Let us be content, therefore, to believe him to be a spirit, that is, an essence that we know nothing of, in which originally and necessarily reside all energy, all power, all capacity, all activity, all wisdom, all goodness.
Never place a period where God has placed a comma.
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that He's evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that, basically, He's an underachiever.
We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own iniquities.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.
God was a clever idea. The human race came up with a winner there.
O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou art our potter.
God is light.
God is love.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.
God is the Celebrity-Author of the World's Best Seller. We have made God into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
He's the comfort and wine and piccalilli for my soul.
God is a skillful Geometrician.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in't.
God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.
All service is the same with God, With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.
When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
The universe is God's self-portrait.
Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army.
Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?
I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune Him in.
Do I believe in God? Let's say we have a working relationship.
God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.
Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God.
Why indeed must "God" be a noun? Why not a verb—the most active and dynamic of all?
I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Home is the definition of God.
They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and enoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
There is a crack in everything that God has made.
The dice of God are always loaded.
God is not a cosmic bell-boy for whom we can press a button to get things done.
When we read about creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so.
At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun proper or improper.
Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation?
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
God is the Old Repair Man. When we are junk in Nature's storehouse he takes us apart. What is good he lays aside; he might use it someday. What has decayed he buries in six feet of sod to nurture the weeds. Those we leave behind moisten the sod with their tears.
God is man idealized.
As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.
I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the color and fragrance of a flower—the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
I have no need of that hypothesis.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
God is a concept By which we measure Our pain.
God is what man finds that is divine in himself. God is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.
As a friend of mine said, "We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."
After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
Creator. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
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.
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about him.
If the triangles were to make a God, they would give him three sides.
God is a thought that makes crooked all that is straight.
Which is it? Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!
God is a Mother.
God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations.
God is a gentleman. He prefers blondes.
The belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man.
God is a name we give to love.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
God is an unutterable sigh in the human heart.
God, that dumping ground of our dreams.
God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home.
The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
We say God and the imagination are one.
God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.
I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
Even God has become female. God is no longer the bearded patriarch in the sky. He has had a sex change and turned into Mother Nature.
All roads that lead to God are good.
I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature."
Why indeed must "God" be a noun? Why not a verb—the most active and dynamic of all?
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
Suffering is a part of the Divine idea.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.
Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
It is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing.
As they say in the Sikh religion—Once you realize God knows everything, you're free.
Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might Which fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight.
The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
God ... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.
Have faith in God; God has faith in you.
That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
We are a long time in learning that all our strength and salvation is in God.
What does God the Father look like? Although I've never seen Him, I believe—as with the Holy Spirit—He looks like Jesus looked on earth.
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.
When we take one step toward to God, he takes seven steps toward us.
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
'I refuse to prove that I exist' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.' 'Oh,' says man, 'but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't. Q.E.D.' 'Oh, I hadn't thought of that,' says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
'There are no atheists in foxholes' isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.
All deities reside in the human breast.
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law, it is administered with subhuman efficiency.
God—but a word invoked to explain the world.
God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power.
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.
I think I'll believe in Gosh instead of God. If you don't believe in Gosh too, you'll be darned to heck.
If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.
If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment.
If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said 'No'.
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides.
I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.
In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God. I replied, 'I don't think so.' And then proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs- Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone. I said I felt if 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them,' (Genesis 2:27, King James's) then we were God. And when Man (my capitalization, not King James's) in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most God-like. The student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God. I thanked him politely and told him I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas.
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.
On the sixth day God created man. On the seventh day, man returned the favour.
People who rely most on God rely least on themselves.
Some people would have us love, or rather obey God, chiefly because he outbids the devil.
Strange ... a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honourably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for our blessings.
The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
The third major characteristic of God—'infinitude'—is the catchall, the universal modifier of Christian theology. God is not merely a being; he is infinite being. God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness. God is not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom. And so on down the list. God is exaggeration run amuck.
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it ... People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.
He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice, to love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God.
Jeremiah, like Micah, enumerates three types of behavior that give God pleasure: in his case, kindness, justice, and equity.
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.
She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.
I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
