c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward whatlooks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.
— Alice Fulton
O my God, how does it happen in this poor world that you are so great and yet nobody finds you, that you call so loudly and yet nobody hears you, that you are so near and yet nobody feels you, that you give yourself to everybody and yet nobody knows your name? Men flee from you and say they cannot find you; they turn their backs and say they cannot see you; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear you.
— Hans Denck
God abides in men""God abides in men,These are men who are simple,they are fields of corn...Such men have mindslike wide grey skies,they have the grandeurthat the fools call emptiness.God abides in men.Some men are not simple,they live in citiesamong the teeming buildings,wrestling with forcesas strong as the sun and the rain.Often they must forgo dream upon dream...Christ walks in the wildernessin such lives.God abides in men,because Christ has put onthe nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.He has put on everyone's life...to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...Christ has put on Man's nature,and given him back his humanness...God abides in man.
— Caryll Houselander, The Flowering Tree
Genetic code is a divine writing.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe -no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside us as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that's just what we do find inside us.
— C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity
I choose to believe God had a more direct involvement in the creation of my heart and consciousness than in the creation of any book, no matter how thick or old it may be.
— P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
The divine is always abominable."Houses Under The Sea
— Caitlín R. Kiernan
Every organized religion holds that certain behaviors, rituals, personalities, places, and/or books are sacred. These organized teachings are proper in their own place, but they are mere options for the one infused with devotion. To such a one, God is direct and spontaneous, providing him with an immediate source of guidance and direction. His relationship with God is not mediated through anyone or anything. (104)
— Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras
Não importava que Deus no céu fosse católico, protestante ou hindu. O que importava era uma coisa mais profunda, mais antiga e mais forte do que qualquer imagem dessas: um conceito do bem baseado na afirmação da vida, na repulsa à destruição, à perversidade, ao uso e abuso do homem pelo homem. Era a afirmação do humano e do natural.
— Anne Rice, The Witching Hour
I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is?
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
God listens through the atomic door of love.
— Santosh Kalwar
I am who I am', said God to Moses regarding His name,because none was worth to be compared to His godhead.
— Toba Beta
You know we talked about where people go when they die. I just believe you go someplace and I seen her layin there and I thought maybe she wouldn't go to heaven because, you know, I thought she wouldn't and I thought about God forgivin people and I thought about if I could ask God to forgive me for killin that son of a bitch because you and me both know I ain't sorry for it and I reckon this sounds ignorant but I didn't want to be forgiven if she wasn't. I didn't want to do or be nothin that she wasn't like going to heaven or anything like that.
— Cormac McCarthy
They served "Good Food" but only a G, an O and a D were lit up. Personally, I doubted God dined there. Unless God was keen on samonella poisoning and rat droppings in the hamburgers. But then again, what did I know?
— Julie Kenner, Torn
There either is a god or there is not
—  there is a 'design' or not.
If God is anonymous, let it be.
— Santosh Kalwar
... the proper self-knowledge and self-love of every created thing is ipso facto a participation in the knowledge and love of God. The entire universe moves by desire for the Highest Good simply because every part of it loves what God loves - namely, its own being.
— Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace
A winner smiles and a looser cries. The God looks at them and says,'Sorry, guys!
— Santosh Kalwar
God's dream is interwoven into reality by humans.
— Santosh Kalwar
I once had a dream; human was a chosen beast, domesticated by God to manage the planet earth.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
I'm just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything?... I'm not going to be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe. I don't even think about that. I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There's only man. And it's he who makes miracles.
— Lorraine Hansberry
No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
— Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity
I think of these desert years of mine, not of my choosing. Maybe if it were all smooth and comfortable, if my pride and professionalism were defining life for me, God's steel-quiet, penetrating word would have been lost in the babble and sheen of success.
— Luci Shaw
With wine and being lost, withless and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read meI rode God far--I rode Godnear, he sang,it wasour last ride overthe hurdled humans.They cowered whenthey heard usoverhead, theywrote, theylied our neighinginto one of theirimage-ridden languages.
— Paul Celan, Glottal Stop
The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be asolipsist.
— Kedar Joshi
Extinction catches Man by surprise because no one can even imagine that such a catastrophe can happen to an intelligent species.
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
What is the basic difference between saying 'I know that God exists' and saying 'I know that love exists'?
— Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.
— Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
There are no perfect human beings and even those who we pray such as Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Krishna among others, were not perfect.
— Santosh Kalwar
When God breaks in, the only thing you can do is believe it or not. YOu cannot ask for a receipt of the transaction or a sign for the dubious. God does not offer to cover your backside.
— Anna Carter Florence, Preaching as Testimony
Total Enlightenment is 'Vision without Purpose'.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
The Word says God put ever star in the heavens and even give ever one of em a name. If one of em was gon' fall out the sky, that was up to Him, too. Maybe we can't see where it's gon' wind up, be He can.
— Ron Hall, Same Kind of Different as Me
The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
At the beginning was The Word. Today I see That in great quotes.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
One of the strengths of the belief in Antinous was its appeal to the most sensitive and inward of mystical natures as well as to the exuberant, joyous and ecstatic sides of human experience.
— Royston Lambert
One reason might be that if I hadn't tripped, I'd have been hamburger.When this sort of thing occurs, people often say that there was some power greater than themselves at work. This sounds reasonable. I am just suggesting that it is not necessary to equate "greater than ourselves" with "stretched across the heavenly vault." It could mean "just slightly greater." A cocoon of energy that we carry with us, that is capable, under some conditions, of affecting physicality. Furthermore, I conjecture that the totality of all these souls is what constitutes the Godhead. I mean this in the same sense as the "Leviathan" of Thomas Hobbes, whereby man, that is everyone together, creates "that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater statute and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was created."And that leads me to my Insight: God was not there at the beginning of evolution; God is what lies at the end of it.
— Paul Quarrington, The Boy on the Back of the Turtle: Seeking God, Quince Marmalade, and the Fabled Albatross on Darwin's Islands
Life is a question asked by God about the way he exists.
— Kedar Joshi
Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew--in the incontestable way that children know things--that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.
— Martha Cooley, The Archivist
We imagine that our theological/conceptual systems are the means by which we know God as God is. I truly believe that such postures and perspectives put us in danger of conceptual idolatry, worshiping our ideas of and frameworks for God.
— Tim Keel, Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos
That which attracts the world must please and pander to the self-importance of man. The world itself is a vain show, and likes its own. Consequently there is nothing which so carries the mass of men along with it as that which flatters the vanity of the human mind. It may assume the lowliest air, but sinful man seeks his own honour and present exaltation.
— William Kelly
The Divine Voice is not always expressed in words. It is made known as a heart-consciousmess
— A.J. Russell, God Calling
We are no longer so lacking in fantasy as to uphold the existence of a god.
— Carl Einstein, Bebuquin
It's ok to be a fool once or twice but never let it be a third time. Be smart and pretend to be a fool and at the end of the hunt make sure you're the one that has the gun.
— Surgeo Bell
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Salvation is more than a word, It is His Word. His word became flesh so we have the opportunity to live.
— Tabitha Robin
He who called her so called her by her true name, for she is the full moon of full moons, afore God!
— Umar Ibn Muhammed Al-Nefzawi, The Perfumed Garden
Clearly outline your plans, acknowledge God and he will direct them for you. If you can have it planned, you can achieve it; if you have it planned big, you will achieve it big. Make your choice!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Dream Big!: See Your Bigger Picture!
New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I would fight every angel between us until God said, "Yes.
— Shannon L. Alder
God will save whomever He chooses to save. The Christian should proselytize not because he thinks he can change everybody
—  he should proselytize because the Gospel being shared is the ultimate act of love: because he thinks he can love everybody.
First knowledge is the knowledge of God.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Service to humanity is service to God.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
God chose to save you for a purpose
— Sunday Adelaja
Haven’t you noticed that men struggle every day to correct the defects of my work? What is a plane or a diving suit but an emendation to my work? Even those who worship me spend their lives disagreeing with me and trying to improve on what I made. When they implore me for help with their misfortunes, deep down, are they not in fact censuring me, because what is a prayer but a rebellion that cannot be expressed?’ He smiled vaguely and added: ‘The only reason they don’t curse me is because they still believe I’m stronger than they are
— José Ferreira Borges de Castro
The Lord is God. God is Holy.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
The morning light shimmered through the trees and gave the lake an otherworldly hue. Everything in summer Michigan seemed to have a soft shimmer to it, as though God had hung gauze over the sky and softly scattered glitter on all His creations.
— Viola Shipman, The Charm Bracelet
If God were to make a million lovely flowers in your image and plant them in a garden with you among them, I would still know you by your scent and by the feel of your petals and by the crazy way you lean towards my light whenever I draw near.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Camomille: Fallible men write books. God writes in sunlight and rivers and planets. Isn't the Universe a good book? I trust it above the printed kind.
— Mark  Siegel, Sailor Twain: Or: The Mermaid in the Hudson
Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.
— Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the humble
The opportunity to do what is right is available at all times.
— Jim George
What is life to Spirit, is death to the ego.
— Vivian Amis, I Am: The Key to Manifesting
Once you have seen his face you will forever long to see it again.
— Max Lucado, God Came Near
But God does give us responsibility, and it takes biblical faith to do those things in dependence on God.
— Craig Groeschel, The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living As If He Doesn't Exist
Devotion to God, righteousness and wisdom, will keep us safe on earth.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
One day I realized, without God, nothing matters. So, I asked Him into my heart.
— Esther Earl, This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl
the gods seldomgivebut so quicklytake.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
When you cultivate a godly thought life your soul will shine and you will exhibit the presence of the Lord in you.
— Elizabeth George, A Woman's High Calling
Although I'm an atheist, I try not to crap all over people's belief in God. It may be nothing more than a placebo, a fairy tale that gives the hopeless hope, but sometimes a little hope is all people need to get through the day. Imagine a unit of soldiers under heavy enemy fire. They are told by their superiors to hold their position, even in the face of overwhelming fire power. The soldiers are being told that reinforcements are on the way, and that thought alone gives them the hope and courage to continue fighting, even if ultimately the reinforcements never arrive. I think some people simply need to believe that God is sending them reinforcements, to get through another day.
— Oliver Gaspirtz
Even in hardship, God’s goodness prevails.
— Todd Stocker, REFINED: Turning Pain into Purpose
Pray each morning and each night.Talk to God and be polite.Tell Him what you're grateful for.Leave your troubles at His door.Share your wishes, needs, and hopes.Ask God how to bravely cope.Tell Him all you learned today.Say the things you need to say.Beg forgiveness for your sins.Pray to live with Him again.Speak with earnest heart and soul.He will listen. This I know.For prayer is hope put to the test.And hope is faith in what is best.Faith is power to do great things.Thus, prayer is faith's enabling wings.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
I believe, if there is some sort of higher power, the universe is it. Whenever religious people ask me where the universe came from, I tell them that it has always been here, and was never created. The Big Bang theory is based on the fact that the universe is expanding right now. And if you rewind the tape, the universe appears to be shrinking. If you rewind the tape far enough, eventually the universe must be just one singular point. Or so the theory goes. But what if the universe has not always been expanding? What if it's pulsating, and one pulse takes trillions of years, and right now the universe is inhaling, and before that, trillions of years ago, it was exhaling?
— Oliver Gaspirtz
Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
Growth comes from God, to those with surrendered, yielded hearts.
— Mary E. DeMuth, Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus
When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.
— Álvaro de Campos
Despite what you think you know, sometimes your plans may be interrupted. Because you were designed for a purpose. You are on a mission to achieve greatness. No matter what obstacles lie in your path, you will reach your destination. Remember God's grace is sufficient.
— Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Leave fears aside, clean tears away! Tell God "here I am, use me!" and he'll give you the assignments that will make your life a fulfilled one. Now dress up to work!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy talesActs like a sick god, but like a god.Because even though he affirms that what doesn’t exist exists,He knows things exist, that he exists,He knows existing exists and doesn’t explain itself,And he knows there’s no reason at all for anything to exist.He knows being is the point.All he doesn’t know is that thought isn’t the point.(10/1/1917)
— Alberto Caeiro
If I die very young, hear this:I was never anything but a kid playing.I was a heathen like the sun and the water,I had the universal religion only people don’t have.I was happy because I didn’t ask for anything at all,Or tried to find anything,And I didn’t find any more explanationThan the word explanation having no meaning at all.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
Our Scripture awakened that most glorious of things, the spontaneous love our Lord so desires His children to bear Him, for it is what He bears them.
— Amy Rachel Peterson, Perpetua: A Bride, a Martyr, a Passion
What does this think about that?Nothing thinks about anything.Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants?If it did, it would be people. . .Why am I worrying about this?If I think about these things,I’ll stop seeing trees and plantsAnd stop seeing the EarthFor only seeing my thoughts...I’ll get unhappy and stay in the dark.And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
Fame is not the reason why brands are created and erected. Be diligent, focused and chain unceasing prayers to God who will continue giving you cheers.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream
Your power is in your story and all the wisdom it has brought you.
— Angela Mayah Solstice, The Courage to Change
It is God’s omnipotence, His consuming holiness, and His right to judge that make Him worthy to be feared.
— David Jeremiah, What Are You Afraid Of?
Praise be to God I’m not good,And have the natural egotism of flowersAnd rivers following their bedPreoccupied without knowing itOnly with blooming and flowing.This is the only mission in the World,This—to exist clearly,And to know how to do it without thinking about it.)
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
The perplexity, the potential— God’s own crucible was not for angels.
— Johnny Worthen, Beatrysel
Know your real Self, beyond who you think you are.
— Vivian Amis
When you are posessed by evil spirits, it is crafty manipulations that you follow; but when you are posessed by the Holy Spirit of God, it is wise discretions you pursue!
— Israelmore Ayivor
It is good for us to have trials and troubles at times, for they often remind us that we are on probation and ought not to hope in any worldly thing. It is good for us sometimes to suffer contradiction, to be misjudged by men even though we do well and mean well. These things help us to be humble and shield us from vainglory. When to all outward appearances men give us no credit, when they do not think well of us, then we are more inclined to seek God Who sees our hearts. Therefore, a man ought to root himself so firmly in God that he will not need the consolations of men.
— Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
Have you ever tried thinking of God as a person instead of an all-powerful vending machine that never gives you the right amount of change? He has feelings too, you know.
— Angela N. Blount, Once Upon a Road Trip
He who has the audacity to stop you from dreaming is he who had given you the imaginations to think, but not those who watch you as you explore the dreams!
— Israelmore Ayivor
If you can change the way you think in time you will notice a change in your heart and also a change in your life and the way you see things.
— The Prolific Penman, Real Expression's of Words Never Heard the Poet, the Man, the Idea
The world is a busy place filled with many busy businesses, both the Godly and the ungodly. It means before you go on to accept any activity or event that comes into the world, you must weigh its Values, examine the Virtues, listen to Views and then you give your Verdict. Satan is not wise; he is just crafty!
— Israelmore Ayivor
If you can't focus then how do you expect to make your dreams come true?
— The Prolific Penman
Prayer is an insurance policy that you can never lapse on.
— The Prolific Penman
I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
He realized he needed strength, sustenance that couldn’t come from bread alone. He desperately needed God.
— J.E.B. Spredemann, An Unforgivable Secret
As your heart goes, so goes your family! If your heart isn't right, no child raising system, rules, or gimmicks will ever work. As your heart goes, so goes your parenting!
— Jim George, A Man After God's Own Heart
We need to abandon our scale and adopt God's because our misguided labels keep us from the right kind of interaction with people.
— Judah Smith, Jesus Is: Find a New Way to Be Human
Sometimes God takes your life for some crazy twists and turns.
— Judah Smith, Jesus Is: Find a New Way to Be Human
God first appeared on the scene of human history in the role of a matchmaker. What a profound and exciting revelation!Is it too much to suggest that Eve came to Adam on the arm of the Lord Himself in the same way that a bride today walks down the aisle of the church on her father’s arm? What human mind can fathom the depth of love and joy that filled the heart of the great Creator as He united the man and woman in this first marriage ceremony?Surely this account is one among countless indications that the Bible is not a work of merely human authorship. Moses is generally accepted as the author of the creation record. But apart from supernatural inspiration, he would never have dared to open human history with a scene of such amazing intimacy—first between God and man, and then between man and woman.
— Derek Prince, God Is a Matchmaker
Believe. Believe in your destiny and the star from which it shines. Believe you have been sent from God as an arrow shot from His own bow. It is the single universal trait that the great of this earth have all shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who roam the winds with mournful wails of regret on their lips.Believe as if your life depended on it... for indeed it does.
— Richard Paul Evans, The Locket
What we really need is only a heart of surrender & always trust what God has plan for our life. So we do our best, God shall take the rest. That's what I called FAITH.
— Olivia Sinaga
Truly I have looked into the very heart of darkness, and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the morning. What if all dark, discouraging moods of the human mind come across my way as thick as the dry leaves of autumn? Other feet have traveled that road before me, and I know the desert leads to god as surely as the green, refreshing fields, and orchards.
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it.
— Mark Galli
God is but a supernatural spirit. He resides dormant in you, until you awaken to liberate yourself from this ignorance that you are body and mind.
— Gian Kumar
That very breath wherewith they utter their complaints is a blessing and a fundamental one too for if God would withdraw that they were incapable of whatsoever else either have or desire.
— Richard Allestree, The Art of Contentment
As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.
— Mark Galli, Chaos and Grace: Discovering the Liberating Work of the Holy Spirit
I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man’s good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
He who challenges the God in his dying bed is indisputably the most courageous man, but not the cleverest one!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
And we ask ourselves, if there is a God, how can this happen? Better to ask, if there is a God... must it be sane?
— Lucien LaCroix
Our spiritual history is the history of God-ventriloquists! The truth is that the voice of God is the voice of cunning Man, the ventriloquist's voice!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
They cried. Yes, yes, they cried. Cried more tears than the Mississippi could hold, but those tears never washed away their faith…
— Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run
As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, "the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.
— Mark Galli
The world will be brighter and wiser without religions, but it will surely be darker and more hopeless without God!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I have done nothing but open windows-God has done all the rest.
— Frank C. Laubach
God generously helps to those who try to do their best without asking God’s help!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Excuse me," she said politely. "But you can't have him. Not yet. He's going to come back with me.
— Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure
I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
— Abraham Lincoln
I don't know what I believe anymore. If God does exist, then He's just an asshole, creating this world full of human suffering and letting all these terrible things happen to good people, and sitting there and doing nothing about it. At June's memorial service, a few people came up to me and said some really stupid things, like how everything happens for a reason, and God never gives us more than we can handle. All I could think was, does that mean if I was a weaker person, this never would've happened? Am I seriously supposed to buy that June's death was part of some stupid divine plan? I don't believe that. I can't. It just doesn't make sense.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
God is a cloud from which rain fell.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.
— Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Devil and God – two sides of the same face.
— Dejan Stojanovic
There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
The only people who soul can truly magnify the Lord are...people who acknowledge their lowly estate and are overwhelmed by the condescension of the magnificent God.
— John Piper, Good News of Great Joy: Daily Readings for Advent
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.
— Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
The forgiveness of God is gratuitous liberation from guilt. Paradoxically, the conviction of personal sinfulness becomes the occasion of encounter with the merciful love of the redeeming God. "There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repenting..." (Luke 15:7). In his brokenness, the repentant prodigal knew an intimacy with his father that his sinless, self-righteous brother would never know.
— Brennan Manning
Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
the grandeur of God reveals itself through simple things
— Paulo Coelho
God is busy and has no time for you.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Words are God’s gift to mend a broken soul.
— Chimnese Davids, Muses of Wandering Passions
My ACTIONS should draw people to the God I serve, not my SALES PITCH. If people want what I have, they'll ask me how to get it. If not, that's their business.
— Stefne Miller, Collision
I don't think there's anything wrong with borrowing someone else's faith to get you through until you get enough on your own.
— Stefne Miller, Collision
Culturally, though not theologically, I’m a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don’t speak very strictly. To those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt feelings and now excuse myself from their business.“Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed—much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love. In every religious tradition on earth, there have always been mystical saints and transcendents who report exactly this experience. Unfortunately many of them have ended up arrested and killed. Still, I think very highly of them.“In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It’s like this—I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, “What kind of dog is that?” I would always give the same answer: “She’s a brown dog.” Similarly, when the question is raised, “What kind of God do you believe in?” my answer is easy: “I believe in a magnificent God
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
You are the grace of my life So tender, so undeserved Hard to believe you're my wife Even harder to put what I feel into words If I need evidence God is good Just looking at you is enough You are the grace of my life For you grace my life with your love
— Brian Littrell
Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
We are supernaturalists first, not naturalists. The only reason we feel compelled to accommodate science is that science says we ought to. But it is science that should accommodate revelation. Revelation has been around much longer.
— Matt      Chandler, The Explicit Gospel
Prayer ain't weakened by distance.
— Vicki Lane, The Day of Small Things
By the external appearance of your knowledge, you have attained (high) ranks and reverence with the people! So seek with Allah higher ranks and closeness by virtue of your hidden good deeds. And know that these two ranks, one cancels out the other.
— Wuhayb ibn al-Wird
Have you ever had an experience with God as wild as your most incredible sexual experience?
— Randy Elrod, Sex, Lies & Religion
New Rome will be destroyedBy the attacks of new vandals.God always remains silent.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
One of Mom's favorite passages from Gilead was: "This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?
— Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
When following God, Zero we never find.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
The world is God's salvation.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
When God becomes routine rather than revival, it's time to switch things up.
— Lysa TerKeurst
A steampunk nationBaby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'causeOur art's official and only partially artificialAnd our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal butThere's not where it settlesBecause it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettleAnd now we face it, this creation we made toTo save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it'sOur safeway they make into a pathetic revelationIn our steampunk nationOur steampunk nation
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can't really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.
— Elisabeth Elliot
Think of the self that God has given as an acorn. It is a marvelous little thing, a perfect shape, perfectly designed for its purpose, perfectly functional. Think of the grand glory of an oak tree. God’s intention when He made the acorn was the oak tree. His intention for us is ‘… the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’ Many deaths must go into our reaching that measure, many letting-goes. When you look at the oak tree, you don’t feel that the loss’ of the acorn is a very great loss. The more you perceive God’s purpose in your life, the less terrible the losses seem.
— Elisabeth Elliot
It is better to have God over your shoulder, than carry the world alone on your back.
— Anthony Liccione
When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable).
— Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control
God doesn't work on our timetable. He has a plan that He will execute perfectly and for the highest, greatest good of all, and for His ultimate glory.
— Charles R. Swindoll
George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.
— Elisabeth Elliot
Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone accept, His Lordship. The Cross, as it enters the love life, will reveal the heart’s truth.
— Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control
Choose to view life through God's eyes. This will not be easy because it doesn't come naturally to us. We cannot do this on our own. We have to allow God to elevate our vantage point. Start by reading His Word, the Bible...Pray and ask God to transform your thinking. Let Him do what you cannot. Ask Him to give you an eternal, divine perspective.
— Charles R. Swindoll
The size of a challenge should never be measured by what we have to offer. It will never be enough. Furthermore, provision is God's responsibility, not ours. We are merely called to commit what we have - even if it's no more than a sack lunch.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Either we are adrift in chaos or we are individuals, created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where we are. Can you believe that? Can you trust God for that?
— Elisabeth Elliot
God never calls His people to accomplish anything without promising to supply their every need.
— Charles R. Swindoll
God has called His creation to find satisfaction in a personal relationship with Him, and stop trying to manage the world by conforming it to our expectations, and to allow Him to govern His creation. He continues to say through an ancient Hebrew worship song, "Be still and know that I am God!
— Charles R. Swindoll
Jesus kept it simple. The lesson wasn't complicated. 'I speak
—  you believe My word
To be "in Christ" is to place one's trust in Him for salvation from sin. To be "in Christ" is to trust His goodness, not our own; to trust that His sacrificial death on the cross paid the complete debt of death we owe for our sin; to trust that His resurrection gives us eternal life instead of relying upon our own ability to please God. To be "in Christ" is to claim, by faith, the free gift of salvation. To be "in Christ" is to enjoy a completely restored relationship with our Father in heaven by virtue of His Son's righteous standing.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Choose to view life through God's eyes.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Boldness in the course of a noble fight is worth the risk...If you stand on truth, you'll only regret your timidity later, but you'll never regret being bold.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Sin may have the power to kill and destroy, but God is the Creator of life. He can create it from nothing, and He can restore it from death.(John 11:25-26)
— Charles R. Swindoll
Jesus never commanded believers to produce fruit. Fruit is the *purpose* of the branch, but it is not the *responsibility* of the branch. The branch cannot produce anything on it's own. However, if it remains attached to the vine, it will receive life-sustaining sap, nourishment, strength, everything it needs.
— Charles R. Swindoll
The matters we or the world might consider trivial, He cares about and wants to remedy. He longs to relieve our worries and has promised to supply our most fundamental needs.
— Charles R. Swindoll
In seasons of hiddenness our sense of value is disrupted, stripped of what "others" affirmed us to be. In this season God intends to give us an unshakable identity in Him, that no amount of adoration nor rejection can alter.
— Alicia Britt Chole, Anonymous: Jesus' Hidden Years ... and Yours
In some ways I admire Aunt Helen's unwavering certainty in God's divine plan. It must be comforting, to have faith like that. To believe so concretely that there's someone—something—out there watching guard, keeping us safe, testing us only with what we can handle. I've never believed in anything the way Aunt Helen believes in God.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
In the wilderness, God's covenant people struggled with a choice between feeding their bellies and nourishing their souls. God provided manna--a breadlike food that fell to the ground during the night--to sustain the wandering Israelites and to teach them how to value His Word more than physical fulfillment.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Telling someone like my mother that Hell is a real, physical place, somewhere you can travel to and from, would be like spray-painting the statue of Jesus hanging over the pulpit during mass. Better off telling her the Pope is gay.
— Bill Blais, No Good Deed
God help me! I am small and alone but I must help them; and I most not waste a moment, because every moment another soul dies.
— Leslie H. Hardman, The Survivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant
Fundamentalists offer us a "loving" God who is some kind of divine stalker.
— Robert M. Price
Warren knows God doesn't chow down on Doritos or caviar. What he fails to see, however, is that there is no difference in principle between the old animal sacrifice theology and his own. Surely the same principle applies to emotional gratification. He is still manifestly talking about the care and feeding of God. His God, like an insecure boyfriend, seems to need emotional stroking.
— Robert M. Price
The wise men posit questions to which they may not always find immediate answers, but through their reflections God stimulates man in his search for truth - which in the last analysis is a search for God himself.
— University of Navarra, The Navarre Bible: Wisdom Books
Israel's first king, Saul, looked like he was born for the role. He was tall, handsome, intelligent, and sensitive to God's leading. But he eventually lost most of his attractive qualities, the most important being obedience.
— Charles R. Swindoll
God never asked us to meet life's pressures and demands on our own terms or by relying upon our own strength. Nor did He demands that we win His favor by assembling an impressive portfolio of good deeds. Instead, He invites us to enter His rest.
— Charles R. Swindoll
I live my life in widening circleThat reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one,But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower.I have been circling for thousands of years,And I still don't know: am I a falcon,A storm, or a great song? [I, 2]
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
God presents the Sabbath rest as a shelter we can enter. (Hebrews 4:1-11)
— Charles R. Swindoll
Life...as God intended it enables us to live above the drag of fear, superstition, shame, pessimism, guilt, anxiety, worry, and all the negativity that keeps people from seizing each day as a gift from Him.
— Charles R. Swindoll
If there is a god, or hundreds of them, I hope they will forgive me for the harm I may have inflicted on you by telling you exactly what happened.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
The crisis of physical hunger is essentially a crisis of faith. What or whom will you trust to meet your most basic needs? Will you trust the God who made human bodies, or will you seek your own way? (Deuteronomy 8:1-3)
— Charles R. Swindoll
While God, for the most part, allows this cosmos [creation] to work according to the laws of nature, there is never a time when He is not actively involved in every detail of life.
— Charles R. Swindoll
When we panic, we instinctively turn to our own internal resources because we doubt Him.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Jesus didn't come to earth to establish a new religion. He came to restore a broken relationship. He came to make the primary, primary again. The secondary activity of obedience to the law of God was always intended to serve the primary activity: to love God and enjoy Him forever. When that is primary, the secondary becomes a labor of love, a joyful, and "easy" burden to bear. (Matthew 11:28-30
— Charles R. Swindoll
Faith itself cannot accomplish anything, yet without faith, no one can fly.
— Charles R. Swindoll
To require God to prove that He is able and willing to fulfill His promises would be proof positive that one does not trust Him.
— Charles R. Swindoll