c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
God gave laws to His people to bless them, not to burden them. Every rule either elevates the quality of human life or restores one's relationship with God after a breach. He makes no extraneous demands and He is never capricious.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Pretend you are a foolish to the tyrant – because if he realizes you are a genius, he might use you to harm others.
— A Gentlemen
How does "Let go and let God" measure up against Scripture? Remember, the test isn't what sounds deep, what sounds holy, or even what makes sense to us. For the Christian, the test is Scripture.
— Dan Phillips, The World-Tilting Gospel: Embracing a Biblical Worldview & Hanging on Tight
Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: "The church may not mix in politics." he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess that God is almighty, there is no single area of life from which you can eliminate God. -From the diary of Diet Eman
— Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say
Dysfunction comes when we intertwine the church and God and view them as one.
— Randy Elrod, Sex, Lies & Religion
‎"We live in a world where those things that we never imagine could ever do something, did the best.
— Jestoni Revealed
God is angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even to say this without instantly contradicting themselves. Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various ways that a great many people will be saved without believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor damnation.
— Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology and Other Essays
I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all...and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil."Lady Alice Rowhedge
— Norah Lofts, Bless This House
It seems to me that religion is losing momentum and God is making a comeback.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Hope is magic. Hope is a gift. Hope is a raft we cling to in the midst of a storm. Hope by nature is an independent of logic. Hope is power outside of the facts.The human mind longs for something better. Hope is not rational. Yet who need rationality when God is on our side? The capacity of hope is the most significant fact in life.
— Tommy Tran
There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we know that they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears.
— Pauline Réage
I regard myself as the most wretched of all men, stinking and covered with sores, and as one who has committed all sorts of crimes against his King. Overcome by remorse, I confess all my wickedness to Him, ask His pardon and abandon myself entirely to Him to do with as He will. But this King, filled with goodness and mercy, far from chastising me, lovingly embraces me, makes me eat at His table, serves me with His own hands, gives me the keys of His treasures and treats me as His favorite. He talks with me and is delighted with me in a thousand and one ways; He forgives me and relieves me of my principle bad habits without talking about them; I beg Him to make me according to His heart and always the more weak and despicable I see myself to be, the more beloved I am of God.
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
What is the scent of water?""Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water
We must never forget to pray, and to ask God to remember us when He is arranging things, so that we too may feel safe and have no anxiety about what is going to happen.
— Johanna Spyri, Heidi
The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were—the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate and condescending the communication of his benefits, the more attentively are we called to consider them.
— John Calvin, Commentary on Psalms - Volume 5
You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.
— John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life
If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.
— John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason: Moving God's Love from Your Head to Your Heart
When you suffer, you are being conformed to the image of Jesus. When you pray, you are being made holy in the image of Jesus. When you quietly serve a person in need, you are being shaped into the image of Jesus. When you generously give, your heart is being remade into the image of Jesus, our Lord and Savior.
— Allen R. Hunt, Confessions of a Mega Church Pastor: How I Discovered the Hidden Treasures of the Catholic Church
God works in mysterious ways but at least he works, he's never on welfare in a mysterious way.
— Stephen Colbert
God always ignores the present perfection for the ultimate perfection.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
God doesn't believe in the easy way.
— James Agee, A Death in the Family
If it is true, if it is beautiful, if it is honorable, if it is right, then claim it. Because it is from God. And you belong to God.
— Rob Bell
Our God Is Alive and Well. Sorry About Yours.
— Carl Sagan, Contact
Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as 'Father' at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimentingWith various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to doThen you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
— Stevie Smith, Collected Poems
The primary purpose of reading the Bible is not to know the Bible but to know God.
— James Merritt
Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water
Through my choices and actions, I have learned the most effective way of speaking to God is without saying a word.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus
— Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith
God's plan for your life is happening right now. It doesn't begin when you get married or when you get your dream job or when everything feels perfect. You are IN the plan. - TLC's friend Kris (p.159)
— Tara Leigh Cobble, Crowded Skies: Letters To Manhattan
The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)
— Tara Leigh Cobble, Crowded Skies: Letters To Manhattan
Hans clacked his side-lips. "Do you have the sentence in your head that tomorrow's procession will halt this pest of yours, that it will bar the small-lives from the High Woods?""If it is as you say, no. No more than prayer can stay a charging horse. But that is not why we pray. God is no cheap juggler as to play for a pfennig.
— Michael Flynn, Eifelheim
Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.
— A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.
— A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
This hill, though high, I covet to ascend; The difficulty will not me offend. For I perceive the way to life lies here. Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear. Better, though difficult, the right way to go, Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.
— John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
You may conquer her love of God: you will never overcome her fear of the devil.
— Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
Only God can mend a broken heart.
— Kevin  Walker, These Moments Pass: Poems
But you will imagine that it is best that He should at once enable you to see clearly. If it is, you may be sure He will do it. He never makes mistakes. But He often deals far differently with His disciples. He lets them grope their way in the dark until they fully learn how blind they are, how helpless, how absolutely in need of Him. What His methods will be with you I cannot foretell. But you may be sure that He never works in an arbitrary way. He has a reason for everything He does. You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His every act.
— Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, Stepping Heavenward
Do we behave out of fear of punishment, or out of the demands of our heart? For me, it is the latter, as I would hope is true for all adults, thought I know from bitter experience that such is not often the case. To act in a manner designed to catapult you into heaven would seem transparent to a god, any god,for if ones heart is not in allignment with the creator of that heaven, then... what is the point?
— R.A. Salvatore, The Ghost King
If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone.
— Sheldon B. Kopp
People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Tell me I'm a sinner I got news for youI spoke to God this morning and he don't like you!Don't you try and teach me no original sin
— I don't need your pity for the shape I'm in
In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.
— Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers
Go on, my dear," urges the snake. "Take one. Hear it? 'Pluck me,' it's saying. That big, shiny red one. 'Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.' You know you want to.", clever girl, "expressly forbids us to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge."?"Eve folds her arms schoolgirlishly. "God expressly forbade it. Adam said."The snake grins through his fangs, admiring Eve's playacting. "God is a nice enough chap in His way. I daresay He means well. But between you and The Tree of Knowledge, He is terribly insecure.""Insecure? He made the entire bloody universe! He's omnipotent.""Exactly! Almost neurotic, isn't it? All this worshiping, morning, noon, and night. It's 'Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise the Everlassssting Lord.' I don't call that omnipotent. I call it pathetic. Most independent authorities agree that God has never sufficiently credited the work of virtual particles in the creation of the universssse. He raises you and Adam on this diet of myths while all the really interesting information is locked up in these juicy apples. Seven days? Give me a break.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
The human brain has the unique ability to doubt the reality presented to itself. To comprehend the dissonance between ideas and the truth of the surrounding world. God knows this, and it infuriates him. It terrifies him.
— Autumn Christian, The Crooked God Machine
God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.
— Eric    Weiner, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine
The truest of all truths is this: You are a child of God. Out of more than six billion people on earth now, He knows your name, what you fear and what you revere. He cares about the things you care about. He wants your happiness and success, and will reach to the farthest corner of the universe to see that you obtain your noblest dreams.
— Toni Sorenson
The trouble with me, he thought unhappily, is that I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form we expect and demand.
— Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many
Strange how it is that men never act crueler than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do.
— Marcel Theroux, Far North
I learned that one person hurting another really is like a hand curling into a fist to smash the foot. And that all that really matters is family and other people. And that the purpose of life is to find the Light of God, but not the light from some old guy with a beard sitting up there judging us. The light is the love we give each other on our way back home. And that God wouldn’t mind if we spent a little less time telling him how great he is and a little more time loving each other, and not just the people we’re supposed to love, but everyone.
— Paul H. Magid, Lifting the Wheel of Karma
A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us.
— Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
I have to ask myself how I can possibly expect to know Jesus as he would want to be known if my life remains unscathed by trouble and grief. How can I hope to grasp anything of God's heart for this broken planet if I never weep because its brokenness touches me and breaks my heart? How can I reflect his image if I never share in his sufferings? And how will any of us ever learn to treasure his hesed and grace if we never experience phases where these blessings seem absent?
— Carolyn Custis James
It wasn't necessary to know your own demons in order to find God.
— Paulo Coelho
God is not someone you meet when you die. His smiling face will be the first and the most familiar to greet you on the other side of mortality. You’ll recognize Him and know in your heart of hearts that you’re not entering a new sphere, but returning home to the place you’ve always belonged.
— Toni Sorenson
Every human being has divinity encased within its spirit and it is the task of its creator as well as itself to set it free. No human being is an end product, every being still breathing is a creation still under creation.
— Toni Sorenson
‎The only way Jesus can be our King is if we allow Him to be our Servant
— Stuart Greaves
people don't get meit's more rule than exceptionGod bless exceptions
— Beth Myrle Rice, Clips & Consequences: a memoir
oh my soul...be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions
— William Paul Young, The Shack
Ik zou een héél boek willen schrijven over een kiezelsteen en over een paars viooltje. Ik zou met één enkele kiezelsteen heel lang kunnen leven en een gevoel kunnen hebben in Gods machtige natuur te leven.
— Etty Hillesum, Etty
God tests, but he does not tempt.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
In me is working a power stronger than every other power. The life that is in me is a thousand times bigger than I am outside.
— Smith Wigglesworth
Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)
— Tim Willocks, The Religion
Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
The most destructive thing we can possibly do in life is to make another person doubt his worth and identity as a child of God. The very most productive thing we can do is to help ourselves and others realize that as children of God, our worth is infinite.
— Toni Sorenson
You twitch as the darkness moves in and out of you. It crawls up your spine and nestles in your brain like an evil thought from out of nowhere, burying itself in your psyche like a starving leech looking for a vein.
— Stephen Biro, Hellucination
In a way, the futile excuses many people use to cover their superstitions are demolished. They think it is enough to have some sort of religious fervor, however ridiculous, not realizing that true religion must be according to God's will as the perfect measure; that He can never deny Himself and is no mere spirit form to be changed around according to individual preference.
— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Prayer [is] the quiet, persistent living of our life of desire and faith in the presence of our God.
— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer
The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.
— John Milton, Milton on Education, the Tractate of Education,: With Supplementary Extracts from Other Writings of Milton
There is something deep within us that sobs at endings. Why, God, does everything have to end? Why does all nature grow old? Why do spring and summer have to go?
— Joe L. Wheeler
Love is love. It is God-given, and a sacrament. It is not for any man to judge.
— Kathleen McGowan, The Poet Prince
Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little In comparison to eternal realities.--
— Robert Murray McCheyne
Fear cannot stay in the same house as Jesus Christ.
— Jack Coe
Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die childless, the Fear gave her a son. When Abraham was about to slaughter the son, the Fear gave him the ram. He is always shielding us like a guttering wick, Laughter said, because the fire he is trying to start with us is a fire that the whole world will live to warm its hands at. It is a fire in the dark that will light the whole world home.
— Frederick Buechner, The Son of Laughter
Lift up your heads, ye people,lift up your faces, too,open your mouths to sing His praise,and the rain will fall on you.
— Aimee Semple McPherson
Boy you really missed the boat. I’ll make it simple, so’s even fuckin you can understand. Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants; then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the fuck outta town”. Water rushes to his eye-holes. “Don’t be lookin up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers”. He takes hold of my shoulders, spins me around, and punches me towards the mirror on the wall. “You’re the God. Take responsibility. Exercise your power
— D.B.C. Pierre
Contemplative prayer is natural, unprogrammed; it is perpetual openness to God, so that in the openness his concerns can flow in and out of our minds as he wills.
— Ray Simpson, Exploring Celtic Spirituality
GOD. Sometimes I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we're up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costume. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and butt-hugging yoga pants. Male, female, a genderless reincarnation factory; a Mother Earth or a withholding Father Christmas. I would think it would amuse the hell out of him. That we're all idolaters, worshiping figments of our own creation who bear no resemblance to him.Maybe he's sitting in some alternate dimension somewhere, saying, 'Shit, I didn't even create the world! I was just cooking my dinner, not paying attention to the heat, and suddenly here was this big band and a few hours later, a bunch of dinosaurs...
— Suzanne Morrison, Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to  Enlightenment
We are not to be occupied with our feelings or symptoms,or our faith or lack of faith,but only with what God has said
— Gordon Lindsay
Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
An entire nation shook under the power of one man’s [MLK’s] dream! Now if one dream can do that for our nation, imagine what a dream can do for the Church.
— Wayne Cordeiro
i'd rather be beautiful on thee inside where it is never seen by the world but always seen by the one true living God
— Samone Sherrell
Self distrust is good, but only if it leads to trust in God. Otherwise it ends as spiritual paralysis, inability and unwillingness to undertake any course of action.
— Alan  Cole
God, nevertheless, required a little help from men, and what he mostly got was hindrance.
— Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones
No one knows the Truth, but those who have the Truth
— Samone Sherrell
Is it a time for you, you I say, to dwell in your roofed-in houses?' (Haggai 1:4). The reply might have been that it was unreasonable to expect anyone to live in a roofless house, but the question made its point. What worth did they set on their God, when they left His Temple in ruins?
— Joyce G. Baldwin
Anyone who has learned the Quran and holds it lovingly in his heart will 'value his nights when people are asleep, his days when people are given to excess, his grief when people are joyful, his weeping when people laugh, his silence when people chatter and his humility when people are arrogant'. In other words every moment of life will be precious to him, and he should therefore be 'gentle', never harsh nor quarrelsome, 'nor one who makes a clamour in the market nor one who is quick to anger'.
— Ibn Mas'ud
Let us be today’s Christians. Let us not take fright at the boldness of today’s church. With Christ’s light let us illuminate even the most hideous caverns of the human person: torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness. The oppressed must be saved, not with a revolutionary salvation, in mere human fashion, but with the holy revolution of the Son of Man, who dies on the cross to cleanse God’s image, which is soiled in today’s humanity, a humanity so enslaved, so selfish, so sinful.
— Oscar A. Romero, The Violence of Love
At the end of time when God judges us humans, I just hope He remembers to judge Himself as well.
— Indra Sinha, Animal's People
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind on God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. "When I awake, I am still with thee" (Psalm 139:18). The thoughts are as travelers in the mind. David's thoughts kept heaven-road. "I am still with Thee." God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory?... A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.
— Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship
I take leave to contradict those who say that salvation is an evolution! All that ever can be evolved out of the sinful heart of man is sin-and nothing else! Salvation is the free gift of God, by Jesus Christ, and the work of it is supernatural. It is done by the Lord Himself, and He has power to do it, however weak, no, however dead in sin, the sinner may be!
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Righteousness and love, law and grace, life and death, as well as time and eternity all intersect at the cross; displaying a divine wisdom that staggers the imagination and leads the humble heart to bow in thankful adoration. To understand the cross of Christ is to understand the heart of God toward a fallen world He wants to save.
— Steven Cook
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
It doesn’t cause me to doubt God’s existence, but it does force me to admit there’s a lot about God I don’t understand.
— Carolyn Custis James, The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
— Peter Shaffer, Amadeus
To their simple, degenerate minds there was only one thing to do when faced by a God more powerful than their own: Convert.Brandon Sanderson(Elantris)
— Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
I have yet to hear God's audible voice, although I have often felt led by God in more subtle ways.
— Tony Dungy, Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life
The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I've ever met.""You've met God?""Certainly. I telephone Him every night.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
And the news got worse. It appeared that there was this whole other person Jesus Christ whose birthday a lot of people tended to confuse with mine. I was personally outraged. It was a long time before I forgave the Lord for that.
— Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story
But somehow, once you start playing behind the steering wheel of God, you realize just how powerful it is to be the imagination driving the natural world (64).
— Kola Boof, The Sexy Part of the Bible
Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the "historical Gethsemane," does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.
— Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation
God of the impossible, maker of all miracles, I stand in awe of You, I'm so amazed by how You reach into my brokenness, make me beautiful again, I believe yes, I believe nothing is impossible with You.
— Sarah Reeves
(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.
— Milan Kundera, Encounter
If there was a God he reasoned it would have the same relation to us as we have to blades of grass. Do we make them grow? Yes in the sense that we water the lawn. Do we care for them and worry over them? Again as a lawn but not as individual blades. We don't give them names. We just want them to look nice and green. A God who created the earth would want it to look nice an blue from space. He would sit back after a long day of creating things and think to himself now that's what a planet should look like.
— Tom Lichtenberg, Time Zone
Was I sorry that I chose to come by hand cart? No. Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay and I am thankful that I was privileged to come in the Martin Hand Cart Company.
— Francis Webster
God is always working in every detail of our lives to help us turn our heart toward him. The life we've always wanted is found in Jesus.
— Gary Heim and Lisa Heim, True North: Choosing God in the Frustrations of Life
Slowly, God is opening my eyes to needs all around me. In Scripture, God revisits this issue of caring for the poor- an echo that repeats itself from Genesis to Revelation. The Bible acknowledges that the poor will always be part of society, but God takes on their cause. The Mosaic law of the Old Testament is filled with regulations to prevent and eliminate poverty. The poor were given the right to glean- to take produce from the unharvested edges of the fields, a portion of the tithes, and a daily wage. The law prevented permanent slavery by releasing Jewish bondsmen and women on the sabbatical and Jubilee year and forbade charging interest on loans. In one of his most tender acts, God made sure that the poor- the aliens, widows, and orphans- were all invited to the feasts.
— Margaret Feinberg, The Sacred Echo: Hearing God's Voice in Every Area of Your Life
When I think of existence, I cannot help but wonder, "What is life, anyway?" Where do I fit in the grand scheme of life? What is the point of it, anyway? Is this a test—and if so, am I passing it?
— C.J. Sinclair, I Beg to Differ
Do I believe in God? Sure. So I believe the Bible is the arbiter of theological knowledge? There it gets a little hazy.
— Don Hoesel, Elisha's Bones
Prayer is asking God to incarnate, to get dirty in your life. Yes, the eternal God scrubs floors. For sure we know he washes feet. So take Jesus at his word. Ask him. Tell him what you want. Get dirty. Write out your prayer requests; don't mindlessly drift through life on the American narcotic of busyness. If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don't let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
Men will trust in God no further than they know Him
—  and they cannot be in the exercise of faith in Him one ace further than they have a sight of His fulness and faithfulness in exercise.
Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.
— John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence
When confronted with suffering that won't go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,...not on the Master's hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it's just that you're in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you... will begin to see the patterns. You'll become a poet, sensitive to your Father's voice.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
Our obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure. This is good news, because it means very simply that the command to obey is the command to be happy in God. The commandments of God are only as hard to obey as the promises of God are hard to believe. The Word of God is only as hard to obey as the beauty of God is hard to cherish.
— John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God
as the needs of all living things must, we have proved that it is a very safe thing to trust in the Lord our God.
— Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord
Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child
But he looks no more than thirty. He's very handsome-- so much you will admit; nor will you deny that he is very wealthy and very powerful; the greatest nobleman in Brittany. He will make me a great lady.''God made you that, Aline.
— Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche
O Lord, I am further away from me than from You!
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder. Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds. We are learning to watch for the story to unfold, to wait for the wonder.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
Christ.No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.
— Stephen King, Pet Sematary
But that is the nature of true grace and spiritual light, that it opens to a person's view the infinite reason there is that he should be holy in a high degree. And the more grace he has, and the more this is opened to view, the greater sense he has of the infinite excellency and glory of the divine Being, and of the infinite dignity of the person of Christ, and the boundless length and breadth and depth and height of the love of Christ to sinners. And as grace increases, the field opens more and more to a distant view, until the soul is swallowed up with the vastness of the object, and the person is astonished to think how much it becomes him to love this God and this glorious Redeemer that has so loved man, and how little he does love. And so the more he apprehends, the more the smallness of his grace and love appears strange and wonderful: and therefore he is more ready to think that others are beyond him.
— Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections
Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child
I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
But somehow, standing in the clear night air, under a sky that glowed like a shower of sparks, none of that stuff mattered. It slipped off me. It was like shedding your clothes before you step in the shower. I felt I was down to essentials again. In fact I felt very close to God at that moment. I guess if you're ever going to feel close to God it'll be while you're looking at the heavens.
— John Marsden, The Night Is for Hunting
The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .
— Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
Do I have YOUR permission to be a Supernatural God? If I want to open heaven, and in a moment in time, touch the heart of a daughter and supernaturally break all the darkness, shame, and torment in her life, MAY I DO THAT?
— Jim Anderson, Unmasked: Exposing the Cultural Sexual Assault
But then again, that's what the Book of Job was about to her, a cautionary tale about wanting there to be a God, wanting there to be someone who could enact what a God could enact, or who could sanction what the Devil would do. You want this, people? You want these kinds of powers? No, you don't, and here's why, and here's why it's sheer vanity to want them in any other entity. Look what sort of violence would rain down. Poor Job, sure, poor Job with his hives and his financial losses — though who needs three thousand camels? — and too bad about the kids, forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold, sure, too bad, but it's God who's the miserable bastard here. Look what he got himself up to! No good could come of that type of power; that's what the writer of the Book of Job was saying, and she knew the writer was right.
— Michelle Latiolais, Widow: Stories
Without a spiritual wakefulness to divine purposes and connections in all things, we will not know things for what they truly are.
— John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God
No, I don't believe it," Joseph said. "From listening to my father and grandfather talk about El Shaddai, I think he's different from the gods of Egypt. I think that none of us could ever be good enough for God. I think of Him as being so good that a human can't even enter His presence. A man would die if he did. I think God's merciful, Rashidi. I think he forgives us because he loves us, just as we forgive our children because we love them. "Rashidi's eyes brightened. "A God that loves people! Now there's a new thought!
— Gilbert Morris, Till Shiloh Comes
Please, dear God of happiness, show the radiance of your spectrum to our world, which here means to forget everything.
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
Does anybody know which are the thoughts of God, even if they are plants, mountains, sky, stars or whatever else?
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
Can I tell from the twilight from which the world is built that I am a sunrise in this life?
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
Once we are a creation, how much absurdity can there be in our heart without God the Creator.
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
But saints and angels behold that glory of God which consists in the beauty of His holiness; and it is this sight only that will melt and humble the hearts of men, wean them from the world, draw them to God, and effectually change them. A sight of the awful greatness of God may overpower men's strength, and be more than they can endure; but if the moral beauty of God be hid, the enmity of the heart will remain in its full strength. No love will be enkindled; the will, instead of being effectually gained, will remain inflexible. But the first glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God shining into the heart produces all these effects as it were with omnipotent power, which nothing can withstand.
— Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections
Engage in no pursuit in which you cannot look up unto God, and say, 'Bless me in this, my Father!
— Legh Richmond
I remembered Robyn telling me the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and how they'd survived: when the King chucked them in the furnace and an angel or someone went in with them. The furnace blazed all around them but they didn't burn.And it did calm me. I don't know if it was Robyn or an angel or even God himself was in the boot, but I was starting to suspect that whenever I wanted God, he was there. Only not necessarily in the form I wanted, or doing what I wanted...In the pitch of the black boot I clung to the image of a fiery furnace, and it wasn't the furnace or Hell either.
— John Marsden, The Night Is for Hunting
You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.
— Ramakrishna, Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna
‎God remains silent so that men and women may speak, protest, and struggle. God remains silent so that people may really become people. When God is silent and men and women cry, God cries in solidarity with them but doesn't intervene. God waits for the shouts of protest.
— Elsa Tamez
Call it the Human Mission-to be all and do all God sent us here to do. And notice-the mission to be fruitful and conquer and hold sway is given both to Adam and to Eve. 'And God said to them...' Eve is standing right there when God gives the world over to us. She has a vital role to play; she is a partner in this great adventure. All that human beings were intended to do here on earth-all the creativity and exploration, all the battle and rescue and nurture-we were intended to do together. In fact, not only is Eve needed, but she is desperately needed.When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. 'It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]' (Gen. 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is 'notoriously difficult to translate.' The various attempts we have in English are "helper" or "companion" or the notorious "help meet." Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat...disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing "One day I shall be a help meet?" Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it "sustainer beside him"The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately.
— Stasi Eldredge, Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul
There is an old joke that went around- it goes, in the beginning God made man in His own image, and since the fall, man has been seeking to return the compliment.
— Alistair Begg
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
— Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
Having an answer is a comfort. It's when you start asking questions and those questions pull threads in the larger fabric, you're forced to wonder what you're left with. And for people of any age, it's scary to think the fabric of the universe - or the universe as you've always believed it existed - can just unwind, you know?
— Robin Epstein, God Is in the Pancakes