c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
My soul doth magnify the Lord,And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
— Mary (mother of Jesus), Holy Bible: King James Version
I try not to make plans. God always laughs at your plans. I’m going to keep the door open, and keep the page blank, and see what gets painted upon it.
— Tom Hiddleston
Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...
— H.P. Lovecraft
Quit questioning God and start trusting Him!
— Joel Osteen
Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what's been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it's been full of sorrow or anger, or even when you're questioning why terrible things have to happen.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
— Madeleine L'Engle
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them
—  and each mind perceives a different beauty.
I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility. 
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my sould to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end.
— James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
— G.K. Chesterton
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..
— Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
— Arthur Schopenhauer
I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
I have found God, but he is insufficient.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts." The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.
— Rob Bell
People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.
— Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth
It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.
— Madeleine L'Engle
Be a sinner and sin﻿﻿ boldly,﻿ but believe and﻿﻿ rejoice in Christ even more boldly.
— Martin Luther
Without God all things are permitted.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?
— John Fante, Ask the Dust
The irony is that while God doesn’t need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don’t really want Him most of the time.
— Francis Chan
[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all. 
— C.S. Lewis
My arms are too short to box with God.
— Johnny Cash
Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
— Lenny Bruce
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
When faith replaces doubt, when selfless service eliminates selfish striving, the power of God brings to pass His purposes.
— Thomas S. Monson
God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.
— Anonymous, The Qur'an / القرآن الكريم
We are women, and my plea is Let me be a woman, holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is.
— Elisabeth Elliot
Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
— Hubert Reeves
I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me
— Donald Miller
And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
How come when mortals want things, their only option is to make a deal with Hell and sell their soul? Why can’t they make deals with God in exchange for good behavior?"It was another of those rare moments when I’d surprised Carter. I waited for the glib answer I’d mentioned to Seth, something along the lines of goodness being its own reward. The angel considered for several seconds. "Humans make those deals all the time," he said finally. "They just don’t make them with God.""Then who are they making them with?" I exclaimed."Themselves.
— Richelle Mead, Succubus Heat
Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
God dwells within you, as you.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard
A lonely day is God's way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
— C.S. Lewis
And my God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
— Anonymous, The Holy Bible: New American Standard Version, NASB
I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk.
— C.S. Lewis
Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
— Albert Einstein
The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.''What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either.
— Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
Don't believe in God. Love the world just the way it is. 
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Why do they blame me for all their little failings? They use my name as if I spent my entire days sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. 'The devil made me do it.' I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.
— Neil Gaiman, Season of Mists
I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
God might work on mysterious ways, but hell worked on efficient ones.
— Richelle Mead, Succubus Shadows
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.
— A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Suppose neutral angels were able to talk, Yahweh and Lucifer – God and Satan, to use their popular titles – into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their early kingdom?Would God be satisfied the loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York Stakes, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all night, no-holds-barred, nasty “can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell-fucks?Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo, Satan get stud poker? Satan get LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan Oscar Wilde?
— Tom Robbins
I'm convinced that most men don't know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man's atrocities, but wouldn't dream of imprisoning a mother for her son's crime?
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
— Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
— Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.
— Desmond Tutu
This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.
— D.H. Lawrence
Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason there of until all of the events transpire.
— Joseph Smith Jr.
You're gonna have to serve somebody; well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody...
— Bob Dylan
God is the same everywhere.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
What is sin?It is the glory of God not honored.The holiness of God not reverenced.The greatness of God not admired.The power of God not praised.The truth of God not sought.The wisdom of God not esteemed.The beauty of God not treasured.The goodness of God not savored.The faithfulness of God not trusted.The commandments of God not obeyed.The justice of God not respected.The wrath of God not feared.The grace of God not cherished.The presence of God not prized.The person of God not loved.That is sin.
— John Piper
You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
— Rabindranath Tagore
I have to believe much in God because I have lost my faith in man.
— José Rizal, Noli Me Tángere
Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting cell, which a nation recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him in the cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true. to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human invention. They didn't need God for that little masterpiece.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
In the heartfelt mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will visit us, to shine on those sitting in darkness, in the shadow of death, to guide our feet to the way of peace.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
Your prayer for someone may or may not change them, but it always changes YOU.
— Craig Groeschel
The more humble and obedient to God a man is, the more wise and at peace he will be in all that he does.
— Thomas à Kempis, The Inner Life
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
— Pablo Picasso
Let nothing disturb you,Let nothing frighten you,All things are passing away:God never changes.Patience obtains all things.Whoever has God lacks nothing;God alone suffices.
— Teresa of Ávila
I tell of hearts and souls and dances...Butterflies and second chances;Desperate ones and dreamers bound,Seeking life from barren ground,Who suffer on in earthly fateThe bitter pain of agony hate,Might but they stop and here forgiveWould break the bonds to breathe and liveAnd find that God in goodness bringsA chance for change, the hope of wingsTo rest in Him, and self to dieAnd so become a butterfly.
— Karen Kingsbury, Oceans Apart
Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith―acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.
— Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.''Why not?''Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version
I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts. Its easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence – easier sometimes than to wait patiently.
— Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control
Men will allow God to be everywhere but on his throne. They will allow him to be in his workshop to fashion worlds and make stars. They will allow Him to be in His almonry to dispense His alms and bestow his bounties. they will allow Him to sustain the earth and bear up the pillars thereof, or light the lamps of heaven, or rule the waves of the ever-moving ocean; but when God ascends Hes throne, His creatures then gnash their teeth. And we proclaim an enthroned God, and His right to do as He wills with His own, to dispose of His creatures as He thinks well, without consulting them in the matter; then it is that we are hissed and execrated, and then it is that men turn a deaf ear to us, for God on His throne is not the God they love. But it is God upon the throne that we love to preach. It is God upon His throne whom we trust.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Personally, I do not want to make you a man. Men are so very frail. Men break. Men die. No, I’ve always wished to make a god.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.
— Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama
Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God's right hand.' Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. 'In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.''Pride is all I have.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
Although it is very easy to marry a wife, it is very difficult to support her along with the children and the household. Accordingly, no one notices this faith of Jacob. Indeed, many hate fertility in a wife for the sole reason that the offspring must be supported and brought up. For this is what they commonly say: ‘Why should I marry a wife when I am a pauper and a beggar? I would rather bear the burden of poverty alone and not load myself with misery and want.’ But this blame is unjustly fastened on marriage and fruitfulness. Indeed, you are indicting your unbelief by distrusting God’s goodness, and you are bringing greater misery upon yourself by disparaging God’s blessing. For if you had trust in God’s grace and promises, you would undoubtedly be supported. But because you do not hope in the Lord, you will never prosper.
— Martin Luther, The Sermons of Martin Luther: 7 Volumes
Did God ever cry over his lost angel, I wonder?
— Libba Bray, Rebel Angels
(on forgiveness) Didn't he and I stand together before an all seeing God convicted of the same murder? For I had murdered him with my heart and my tongue.
— Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
May each of us remember this truth; 'one cannot forget mother and remember God. One cannot remember mother and forget God.' Why? Because these two sacred persons, God and mother, partners in creation, in love, in sacrifice, in service, are as one.
— Thomas S. Monson, Pathways To Perfection: Discourses Of Thomas S. Monson
I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me
—  I see Him all around me.
If pinpointing God's presence were really that simple, then he supposed the beaches would be more crowded in the mornings. They would be filled with people on their own quests, instead of people jogging or walking their dogs or fishing in the surf.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
Perfect prayer does not consist in many words, silent remembering and pure intention raises the heart to that supreme Power.
— Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.
— Georges Duhamel
we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves... But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves -- unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely. 
— Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.
— James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
She has man's brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and woman's heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me when He made that so good combination.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
The easiest way to get touch with this universal power is through silent Prayer. Shut your eyes, shut your mouth, and open your heart. This is the golden rule of prayer. Prayer should be soundless words coming forth from the centre of your heart filled with love.
— Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation
It's our faith that activates the power of God.
— Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything
— Henry Miller, Sexus
For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.
— Stephen King, The Dark Tower
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
gray hair is gods graffiti
— Bill Cosby
We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.
— Anatole France
I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created-but I believe there has to be something
— Stephen King
The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on Earth.
— John Wesley
the nurse smiled and patted my arm. “Don’t give up yet. Sometimes when we think God has written The End, what he really means is The Beginning.
— Rachel Van Dyken, Ruin
Why worry about minor little details like clean air, clean water, safe ports and the safety net when Jesus is going to give the world an "Extreme Makeover: Planet Edition" right after he finishes putting Satan in his place once and for all?
— Arianna Huffington
Woman is the light of God.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Only God is awesome.
— Shane Claiborne
I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…
— David Attenborough
We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).
— Sam Harris
Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.
— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!
— Swami Vivekananda, Raja-Yoga
Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in theworld. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
There is a God part in you. The consciousness. The pure Self. Learn to listen the voice of that Power.
— Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
We must cease striving and trust God to provide what He thinks is best and in whatever time He chooses to make it available. But this kind of trusting doesn't come naturally. It's a spiritual crisis of the will in which we must choose to exercise faith.
— Charles R. Swindoll
Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.
— Desmond Tutu
Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter; we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.
— Anne Frank
The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.
— Søren Kierkegaard
You are not what others think you are. You are what God knows you are.
— Shannon L. Alder
The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
— Carl Sagan
And in despair I bowed my head;"There is no peace on earth," I said;"For hate is strong,And mocks the songOf peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!The Wrong shall fail,the Right prevail,With peace on earth, good-will to men!
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
— Richard Dawkins
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
— Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
— Henry David Thoreau
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.The problem’s name is God.
— Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.
— Richard Rohr
Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching. Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.Harper: That's how people change.
— Tony Kushner, Angels in America
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
— Jules Renard
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
— Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
I am alone this evening, and I am alone because of a cruel twist of fate, a phrase which here means that nothing has happened the way I thought it would. Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me, and now the only trace I have of those happy days is the tattoo on my left ankle. As I sit in this very tiny room, printing these words with a very large pencil, I feel as if my whole life has been nothing but a dismal play, presented just for someone else’s amusement, and that the playwright who invented my cruel twist of fate is somewhere far above me, laughing and laughing at his creation.
— Lemony Snicket, The Hostile Hospital
If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you'll come to remember your spirit. When you're able to transcend an aversion to silence, you'll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated.
— Wayne W. Dyer
Becuse God loves us, but the devil takes an interest.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: For wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.
— Sam Harris
God's only excuse is that he does not exist
— Stendhal
Imagination is a gift given to us from God and each one of us use it differently.
— Brian Jacques
Then I realised that I was the god on this occasion. I had tried to help the bluebottle, but it wouldn't let me. And then I felt sorry for God because I understood his frustration. Sometimes when people offer a helping hand, it gets pushed away. People always want to help themselves first.
— Cecelia Ahern, The Book of Tomorrow
More than anything, he wanted to return to the house with the same look of peace that he'd seen on Pastor Harris's face, but he trudged through the sand, he couldn't help feeling like an amateur, someone searching for God's truths like a child searching for seashells.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one's mind.
— Vincent van Gogh
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Any faith that must be supported by the evidence of the senses is not real faith.
— A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy
If you violate laws of God, you're a sinner.If you violate laws of men, you're a criminal.If you violate your own laws, you're pathetic.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy...walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, 'Business as usual.' But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
I cannot choose but adhere to the word of God, which has possession of my conscience; nor can I possibly, nor will I even make any recantation, since it is neither safe nor honest to act contrary to conscience! Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God! Amen.
— Martin Luther
The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Not all dreamers are winners, but all winners are dreamers. Your dream is the key to your future. The Bible says that, "without a vision (dream), a people perish." You need a dream, if you're going to succeed in anything you do.
— Mark Gorman
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
— Marquis de Sade
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
— Marquis de Sade
– But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?– Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question.– Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem ... hem ... lung cancer ... – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — yes, cancer — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word —and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven. And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices--exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.
— Jim Butcher
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
— Mikhail Bakunin
I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it... I'm not agnostic. Just nonpartisan. Theological Switzerland, that's me.
— Jim Butcher, Death Masks
Walter Issacson biographer of Steve Jobs:I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, “ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50/50, maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more, maybe it’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it lives on.”Then he paused for a second and said, “Yea, but sometimes, I think it’s just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you’re gone.” And then he paused again and said, “ And that’s why I don’t like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.”Joy to the WORLD! There IS an after-life!
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
People make the rules of society, not God.
— V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.
— Rich Mullins
But he was pierced for our transgressions,  he was crushed for our iniquities;  the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,  and by his wounds we are healed.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
The beauty of collaboration between older and younger generations is that we combine strength with wisdom—a surefire way to accomplish more for the glory of God.
— Brett Harris
I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.
— George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.
— Orson Welles
Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering.... The love of God did not protect His own Son.... He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.
— Elisabeth Elliot
To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.
— Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
Even God has a hell: his love of Mankind.
— Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, just watch the sunrise.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses