Quotes About God

much strength and endurance did she have stored inside her? He hoped to God she had enough to see this nightmare through.

But, the giant wasn't a god or a demon. He was just a man, very primitive and frightening, yet still just a man. Besides, anyone with a pinch of sense knew women were smarter than men.

Boredom is why God invented books.

My God!" I said. "It's the Platonic cathouse." "Not exactly the word I'd choose under the circumstances," said

He used to say, God is everywhere. In the work of your hands; in the beating of a bird's wings; in the roots of an oak and in the stones of the riverbed. In the rising of the sun. In the heart of a man. In the wonders we know, and those that are beyond our knowing.

I'm fighting, I'm falling, I'm wondering how a god who's supposed to be merciful can stand by and watch this. I want to shrink down and hide. I want to be invisible.

The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.

May God keep us from benign admiration of Jesus rather than true love and adoration for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat. My shoulder is against yours. you will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals: not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables. When you really look for me, you will see me instantly — you will find me in the tiniest house of time. Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.

What is God? He is the breath inside the breath.

What is seen is not the Truth What is cannot be said Trust comes not without seeing Nor understanding without words The wise comprehends with knowledge To the ignorant it is but a wonder Some worship the formless God Some worship his various forms In what way He is beyond these attributes Only the Knower knows That music cannot be written How can then be the notes Say Kabir, awareness alone will overcome illusion.

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs. fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence.

Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God—al-Dhat—is feminine.

The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.

One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over, it was time for the evening prayer.

even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God's design for the overthrow of Catholicism.

As one Rabbi put it, "God does not come to man oppressively but commensurately with a man's power of receiving him."82 This very important rabbinic insight meant that God could not be described in a formula as though he were the same for everybody: he was an essentially subjective experience. Each individual would experience the reality of "God" in a different way to answer the needs of his or her own particular temperament.

Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic.

Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one's own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.

Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism.

It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality—called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God—seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings.

Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with longing, but this sigh (nafas rahmani) was not an expression of maudlin self-pity. It had an active, creative force which brought the whole of our cosmos into existence; it also exhaled human beings, who became logoi, words that express God to himself. It follows that each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner.

In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the "Kingdom of Ishmael" to conquer Palestine.