Quotes About God

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.

To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.

The self-appointed spokesmen for God incline to shout; He, Himself, speaks only in whispers.

On J-Day our profession will have a lot to answer for! We might at least have withheld our hands instead of making them work against God.

God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.

But gradually we learn something very precious under the tutelage of these wounds. We learn a compassion for others that replaces judging, self-loathing, and the compulsion to find someone to blame. We learn a reverent joy before our wounds that replaces the condemnation of and comparison of ourselves with others that used to fuel our anxiety. We learn that the consummation of self-esteem is self-forgetful abandonment to the Silence of God that gives birth to loving service of all who struggle.

Dying is all about letting go and letting be, as is the awareness of God. People who have traveled far along the contemplative path are often aware that the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes. Union is seen to be the fundamental reality and separateness a highly filtered mental perception.

In this depthless depth we are caught up in a unity that grounds, affirms, and embraces all diversity. Communion with God and communion with others are realizations of the same Center. And this Center, according to the ancient definition, is everywhere. "God is that reality whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Our self-forgetful gaze on God is immersed in God's self-emptying gaze on us, and in this mutual meeting we find rest.

Why do we rush about… looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?

Union with God is not something that needs to be acquired but realized.

The more we journey towards the Center the closer we are both to God and to each other. The problem of feeling isolated from both God and others is overcome in the experience of the Center. This journey into God and the profound meeting of others in the inner ground of silence is a single movement. Exterior isolation is overcome in interior communion

Whatever there is about human identity that can be objectively known, measured, predicted, observed, whether by the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the tax man, or the omniscient squint of your most insightful aunt, there is a foundational core of what we might as well call identity that remains hidden from scrutiny's grip and somehow utterly caught up in God, "in whom we live and move and have our being," in whom our very self is immersed.

Union with God respects all distinctions between creation and Creator and is characterized by awareness of the presence and the transparency of perceived boundaries.

This book, by contrast, proceeds from an ancient Christian view that the foundation of every land is silence (Ws 18:14), where God simply and perpetually gives Himself, This Self-gift is manifested in the creation, in the people of God and their inspired (if stumbling) pursuit of a just society, and most fully, in the Christian view of things, in Jesus Christ.

The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word.

The Prophet also spoke of the supreme degree insofar as it can be reached during life on earth, and this saying is one of those which are called Holy traditions because they transmit the direct words of God: "My slave ceaseth not to draw near unto Me with devotions of his free will until I love him; and when I love him I am the hearing with which he heareth and the sight with which he seeth and the hand with which he graspeth and the foot on which he walketh.

With reference to the heart's blindness and it's cure the Prophet said: "For everything there is a polish that taketh away rust, and the polish of the heart is remembrance of God." And when asked who would rank highest in God's esteem on the Day of Resurrection he answered: "The men and the women who invoke God much in remembrance.

It was his wont to warn them continually that the privilege of living with him in his community brought with it a grave responsibility, for God was Just and would judge them more severely than those who lived in worse ages when it was more difficult to resist evil. He said: "Verily ye are in an age when whoso omitteth one tenth of the law shall be doomed. But there will come an age when whoso fulfilleth one tenth of the law shall be saved.

On another occasion those of his Companions who were with him heard him exclaim more than once: "O my brethren!" They said to him: "O Messenger of God, are we not thy brethren?" and he answered: "Ye are my companions. But my brethren are amongst those who have not yet come" - in other versions "who will come in the last days". The way he spoke suggested that he was referring to persons of great spiritual eminence.

Faith is a living and unshakable confidence, a belief in the grace of God so assured that a man would die a thousand deaths for its sake

Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.… Thus is the Devil ever God's ape.