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God will provide -- ah, if only He would till He does!
-Yiddish Proverb
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If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
-Yiddish Proverb
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God is closest to those with broken hearts.
-Yiddish Proverb
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Forsake not God till you find a better master.
-Scottish Proverb
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Every man for himself and God for us all.
-Proverb
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What men usually ask for when they pray to God is, that two and two may not make four.
-Proverb
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Man does what he can, God does what he will.
-Proverb
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I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
-Maya Angelou
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With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.
-Jean Anouilh
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God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
-W. H. Auden
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God brings men into deep waters not to drown them, but to cleanse them.
-John H. Aughey
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They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
-Francis Bacon
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God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.
-Francis Bacon
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I went to the root of things, and found nothing but Him alone.
-Mira Bai
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We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
-Natalie Clifford Barney
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To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
-Georges Bataille
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How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.
-Samuel Beckett
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The bastard! He doesn't exist!
-Samuel Beckett
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God's providence is on the side of clear heads.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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And now Israel, what does the Lord your God require from you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. Deuteronomy 10:12
-Bible
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But from there you will seek the Lord you God and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul. Deuteronomy 4:29
-Bible
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For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. I Corinthians
-Bible
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God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent; has he not said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good? Numbers 23:19
-Bible
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Oh the depth of both the wisdom and riches of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways beyond understanding.
-Bible
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A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.
-Daniel J. Boorstin
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To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!
-Andre Breton
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All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
-Anita Brookner
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God hears no more than the heart speaks; and if the heart be dumb, God will certainly be deaf.
-Thomas Brooks
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And first Satan's endeavours have ever been, and they cease not yet to instill a belief in the minde of man, There is no God at all. . . . that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours, and is but a Politicall Chymera. . . . Where he succeeds not thus high, he labours to introduce a secondary and deductive Atheisme; that although, men concede there is a God, yet . . . that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existencies therein: That he looks not below the Moon, but hath designed the regiment of sublunary affairs unto inferiour deputations. To promote which apprehensions or empuzzell their due conceptions, he casteth in the notions of fate, destiny, fortune, chance and necessity. . . . Whereby extinguishing in mindes the compensation of vertue and vice, the hope and fear of heaven or hell; they comply in their actions unto the drift of his delusions. . . .
-Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1650)
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Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.
-Martin Buber, I and Thou, 1923
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How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you
-Martin Buber
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It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
-Frederick Buechner
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For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
-Charles Bukowski
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If someone were to prove to me -- right this minute -- that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior.
-Luis Bunuel
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I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
-William S. Burroughs
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If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
-Samuel Butler
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The one thing that a fish can never find is water; and the one thing that man can never find is God.
-Eric Butterworth
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God can only do for you what He can do through you.
-Eric Butterworth
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Fundamentalists believe Jesus was God becoming man. I believe that Jesus was man becoming God.
-Eric Butterworth
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Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.
-Elias Canetti
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Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
-Angela Carter
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When I was young, I said to God, god, tell me the mystery of the universe. But God answered, that knowledge is for me alone. So I said, god, tell me the mystery of the peanut. Then God said, well, George, that's more nearly your size.
-George Washington Carver
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The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.
-Richard Cecil
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Man appoints, and God disappoints.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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Though God's attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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Among the attributes of God, although they are equal, mercy shines with even more brilliance than justice.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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Truth to me was dead, God had never lived, life was full of pain, and death was the end of life. As a young Atheist, I sincerely believed that man had created God to fill the gaps in knowledge that would never be spanned by experience, reason, or science. In 1983 the God who pursues those who deny him interrupted my existence, he captured my soul with raw love. Two decades later, God's tangible friendship still amazes me. To deny his existence I'd have to first deny my own.
-Alicia Britt Chole
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If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
-E. M. Cioran
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A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
-E. M. Cioran
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All the gods are dead except the god of war.
-Eldridge Cleaver
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It is not a difficult matter to learn what it means to delight ourselves in the Lord. It is to live so as to please Him, to honor everything we find in His Word, to do everything the way He would like to have it done, and for Him.
-S. Maxwell Coder
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The belief in God is not therefore based on the perception of design in nature. Belief in design in nature is based upon the belief in God. Things are as they are whether there is a God or not. Logically, to believe in design one must start with God. He, or it, is not a conclusion but a datum. You may begin by assuming a creator, and then say he did this or that; but you cannot logically say that because certain things exist, therefore there is a God who made them. God is an assumption, not a conclusion. And it is an assumption that explains nothing.
-Chapman Cohen
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
-Cyril Connolly
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If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.
-Mary Daly
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Why indeed must God be a noun? Why not a verb -- the most active and dynamic of all.
-Mary Daly
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In His will is our peace.
-Dante Alighieri
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As you know, God is generally on the side of the big squadrons against the small ones.
-Comte DeBussy-Rabutin
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They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
-Emily Dickinson
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One and God make a majority.
-Frederick Douglass
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You need to find The Lord. He's around here somewhere.
-James Dye
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Know that when you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, because you do not seek God purely. You are seeking something along with God, and you are acting just as if you were to make a candle out of God in order to look for something with it. Once one finds the things one is looking for, one throws the candle away. This is what you are doing.
-Meister Eckhart, Ordinary Graces, ed. Lorraine Kisly
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Jesus might have said, I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.
-Meister Eckhart
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To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.
-Meister Eckhart
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The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.
-Meister Eckhart
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Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door.
-Meister Eckhart
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God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.
-Meister Eckhart
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Whoever possesses God in their being, has him in a divine manner, and he shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see.
-Meister Eckhart
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God is the Unique, and he is so perfect that he does not resemble any of the things that exist or any of the things that do not; you cannot describe him using your human intelligence, as if he were someone who becomes angry if you are bad or worries about you out of goodness, someone who has a mouth, ears, face, wings, or that is spirit, father or son, not even of himself. Of the Unique you cannot say he is or is not, he embraces all but is nothing; you can name him only through dissimilarity, because it is futile to call him Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom, Amiability, Power, Justice, it would be like calling him Bear, Panther, Serpent, Dragon, or Gryphon, because whatever you say of him you will never express him. God is not body, is not figure, is not form; he does not see, does not hear, does not know disorder and perturbation; he is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, thought, word, number, order, size; he is not equality and is not inequality, is not time and is not eternity; he is a will without purpose. Try to understand, Baudolino: God is a lamp without flame, a flame without fire, a fire without heat, a dark light, a silent rumble, a blind flash, a luminous soot, a ray of his own darkness, a circle that expands concentrating on its own center, a solitary simplicity; he is...is... She paused, seeking an example that would convince them both, she the teacher and he the pupil. He is a space that is not, in which you and I are the same thing, as we are today in this time that doesn't flow.
-Umberto Eco, Baudolino
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God is clever, but not dishonest.
-Albert Einstein
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God is subtle, but He is not malicious. I cannot believe that God plays dice with the world.
-Albert Einstein
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'Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The dice of God are always loaded.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is a crack in everything God has made.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from
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God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
-Empedocles
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God hath entrusted me with myself.
-Epictetus
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The spirit of Eucharistic love will make you refer everything to the Holy Eucharist, for the Eucharist is the summary of all marvels. It is the permanent mystery in which we find all others. If you have this Eucharistic spirit, if your thoughts are tuned continually toward the Eucharist, the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament will never leave you. God is immense, the universe is filled with God's presence, but the Eucharistic soul prefers to search and find God where he is sacramentally. Just as the eagles assemble where the body is, so also Eucharistic souls are attracted instinctively, easily, and habitually to the Holy Eucharist. Therein is their happiness, their peace; there they find a supernatural knowledge of all things. That is why after holy Communion we often understand some things which before were incomprehensible to us. That is why some saints who were very ignorant spoke admirably of God.
Put yourselves, then, dear sisters, in the holy Eucharist, and you will be in a center of light.
-Peter Julian Eymard, to the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament
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And some to Meccah turn to pray, and I toward thy bed, Yasmin.
-James Elroy Flecker
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I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.
-Henry Ford
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The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
-Sigmund Freud
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Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
-Robert Frost
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God is a verb.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
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Here is God's purpose -- for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
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The mantram becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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I was suddenly arrested by what seemed to be an awful voice proclaiming the words, Eternity! Eternity! Eternity! It reached my very soul
-Stephen Grellet, Memoirs of the Life and Gospel Labors of Stephen Grellet (1860), p. 20
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God is more concerned about who you are than what you do, and He is more concerned about what you do than where you do it.
-Gary Gulbranson
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God is concerned with nations, but nations also need to be concerned with God. No nation can have a monopoly on God, but God will bless any nation whose people seek and honor His will as revealed by Christ and declared through the Holy Spirit.
-John Haggai
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The only way God could impose peace on the world would be to robotize our wills and rob every human being of the power of choice. He has not chosen to do that. He has given every person a free will.
-John Haggai
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Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself.
-H. R. Haweis
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God has been so lavish in his gifts that you can lose some priceless ones, the equivalent of whole kingdoms, and still be indecently rich,
-Wilfrid Heed
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God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.
-Heraclitus
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Throw away thy rod, throw away thy wrath; O my God, take the gentle path.
-George Herbert
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Having given us the package, do you think God will deny us the ribbon?
-Oswald C. Hoffman
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I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.
-R. J. Hollingdale
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Providence certainly does not favor just certain individuals, but the deep wisdom of its counsel, instruction and ennoblement extends to all.
-Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
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The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
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Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
-William James
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God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
-Alfred Jarry
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God is a philosophical black hole â the point where reason breaks down.
-Kedar Joshi
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At the heart of my metaphysic there is the ultimate question and at the heart of the universe there is the ultimate questioner.
-Kedar Joshi
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We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.
-Joseph Joubert
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Man proposes, but God disposes.
-Thomas Kempis
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He does much who loves God much, and he does much who does his deed well, and he does his deed well who does it rather for the common good than for his own will.
-Thomas Kempis
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Don't think so much about who is for or against you, rather give all your care, that God be with you in everything you do.
-Thomas Kempis
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The intention which is fixed on God as its only end will keep people steady in their purposes, and deliver them from being the joke and scorn of fortune.
-Thomas Kempis
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I would not like to see a person who is sober, moderate, chaste and just say that there is no God. They would speak disinterestedly at least, but such a person is not to be found.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man.
-Johann Kaspar Lavater
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Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.
-William Law
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God is only a great imaginative experience.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery -- such suffering, such dreadful suffering -- and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.
-Irving Layton
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God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
-John Lennon
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Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
-C.S. Lewis
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The thing is to rely on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to that dependence. Meanwhile, the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing has yet been done.
-C.S. Lewis
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We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake.
-C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
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It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.
-Abraham Lincoln
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Friends, I agree with you in Providence; but I believe in the Providence of the most men, the largest purse, and the longest cannon.
-Abraham Lincoln
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Some people think that God peers over the balcony of heaven trying to find anybody who is enjoying life. And when He spots a happy person, He yells, Now cut that out! That concept of God should make us shudder because it's blasphemous!
-Paul Little
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Has it ever struck you that the vast majority of the will of God for your life has already been revealed in the Bible? That is a crucial thing to grasp.
-Paul Little
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I was frustrated out of my mind, trying to figure out the will of God. I was doing everything but getting into the presence of God and asking Him to show me.
-Paul Little
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Others think it's a choice between doing what we want to do and being happy, and doing what God wants us to do and being miserable.
-Paul Little
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The idol is the measure of the worshipper.
-James Russell Lowell
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The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.
-Martin Luther
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I find that doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.
-George Macdonald
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Seek to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
-Alexander Maclaren
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Man is a dog's ideal of what God should be.
-Andre Mairaux
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Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things, but each according to its nature, and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.
-Joseph De Maistre
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I am deeply distressed by what I only can call in our Christian culture the idolatry of the Scriptures. For many Christians, the Bible is not a pointer to God but God himself... God cannot be confined within the covers of a leather-bound book. I develop a nasty rash around people who speak as if mere scrutiny of its pages will reveal precisely how God thinks and precisely what God wants.
-Brennan Manning, Signature of Jesus, pp. 188-189
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Even the people we most admire often feel inadequate.
-Andrew Matthews
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God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
-H. L. Mencken
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When we want to know God's will, there are three things which always concur: the inward impulse, the Word of God and the trend of circumstances. Never act until these three things agree.
-F. B. Meyer
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God, I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on Thy heart.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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To honor him whom we have made is far from honoring him that hath made us..
-Michel de Montaigne
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If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.
-Charles Montesquieu
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I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.
-Mother Theresa
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If the Lord be with us, we have no cause of fear. His eye is upon us, His arm over us, His ear open to our prayer--His grace sufficient, His promises unchangeable.
-John Newton
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I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Suddenly is the soul oned to God when it is truly peaced in itself: for in Him is found no wrath. And thus I saw when we are all in peace and in love, we find no contrariness, nor no manner of letting through that contrariness which is now in us.
-Julian of Norwich
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When men make gods, there is no God!
-Eugene O'Neill
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God has been pleased to prescribe limits to his power and to work out his ends within these limits.
-William Paley
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God has been pleased to prescribe limits to his power and to work out his ends within these limits.
-William Paley
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Two men please God -- who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not.
-Nikita Ivanovich Panin
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If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation, that He exists.
-Blaise Pascal
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-Blaise Pascal, Pensees (418) known as Pascal's Wager
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Without God there is for mankind no purpose, no goal, no hope, only a wavering future, an eternal dread of every darkness.
-Jean Paul
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There will be no peace so long as God remains unseated at the conference table.
-William M. Peck
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Men must be governed by God, or they will be ruled by tyrants.
-William Penn
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It is fear that first brought gods into the world.
-Petronius
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One on God's side is a majority.
-Wendell Phillips
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Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men..
-Francis Picabia
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God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
-Pablo Picasso
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You are within God. God is within you.
-Peace Pilgrim
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God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.
-Plotinus
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http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/OPratt.html
-Orson Pratt, Writings (1811-1838)
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If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be spent before the Words of my lord are spent.
-Qur'an
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The grace of God is a wind which is always blowing.
-Sri Ramakrishna
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People do not know what the Name of God can do. Those who repeat it constantly alone know its power. It can purify our mind completely... The Name can take us to the summit of spiritual experience.
-Swami Ramdas
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Place yourself as an instrument in the hands of God, who does his own work in his own way.
-Swami Ramdas
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If you kneel before God, you will stand before men.
-Leonard Ravenhill
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God always has another custard pie up his sleeve.
-Lynn Redgrave
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And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! -- But the great Faith is Love!
-Arthur Rimbaud
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God, that dumping ground of our dreams.
-Jean Rostand
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God, that checkroom of our dreams.
-Jean Rostand
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The difficulty is old, but none the less real. An omnipotent being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.
-Bertrand Russell
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I fear God and next to God I mostly fear them that fear him not.
-Sa'di
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I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within.
-Saint Augustine of Hippo
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Abide in peace, banish cares, take no account of all that happens, and you will serve God according to his good pleasure and rest in him.
-Saint John of the Cross
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I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.
-J.D. Salinger, Teddy, 1954
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I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands....I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion, I blasphemed....He never looked at me again....I had the more difficulty getting rid of Him the Holy Ghost in that He had installed Himself at the back of my head....I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw Him out.
-Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 102, 252-253.
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The existentialist
-Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946
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If we really think about it, God exists for any single individual who puts his trust in Him, not for the whole of humanity, with its laws, its organizations, and its violence. Humanity is the demon which God does not succeed in destroying.
-Salvatore Satta
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How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.
-Robert J. Sawyer
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In conclusion, there is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but, by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. What will you do, Bertie, if it turns out you're wrong? she asked. I mean, what if -- uh -- when the time comes, you should meet Him? What will you say? Russell was delighted with the question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, Why, I should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'
-Al Seckel, in Preface to Bertrand Russell on God and Religion
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Idolatry is in a man's own thought, not in the opinion of another.
-John Selden
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Nothing is void of God, his work is everywhere his full of himself.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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'Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god.
-William Shakespeare
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To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.
-George Bernard Shaw
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The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
-George Bernard Shaw
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I'm one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.
-Martin Sheen
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God is the name we give our conscience.
-Nader Shureih
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I like to interpose in all of my appointments, if the Lord wills.
-A. B. Simpson
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Life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
-Langdon Smith
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Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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Fear God, yes, but don't be afraid of Him.
-J. A. Spender
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By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
-Gloria Steinem
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I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body.
-Lucy Stone
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God has marvelous ways of taking our worst tragedies and turning them into His most glorious triumphs.
-Joseph Stowell
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It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument -- their intellect -- which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.
-Galen Strawson
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Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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God is infinite and without end, but the soul's desire is an abyss which cannot be filled except by a Good which is infinite; and the more ardently the soul longeth after God, the more she wills to long after him; for God is a Good without drawback, and a well of living water without bottom, and the soul is made in the image of God, and therefore it is created to know and love God.
-Johannes Tauler
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When men have gone so far as to talk as though their idols have come to life, it is time that someone broke them.
-Richard H. Tawney
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It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.
-Henry David Thoreau
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I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.
-Paul Tillich
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If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch?
-A. W. Tozer
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The man or woman who is wholly or joyously surrendered to Christ can't make a wrong choice--any choice will be the right one.
-A. W. Tozer
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An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.
-A. W. Tozer
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In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we're pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker's praise without anxiety.
-A. W. Tozer
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What I believe about God is the most important thing about me.
-A. W. Tozer
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People are too apt to treat God as if he were a minor royalty.
-Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
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To know the will of God is the greatest knowledge! To do the will of God is the greatest achievement.
-George W. Truett
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There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.
-Mark Twain
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Whatever a man seeks, honors, or exalts more than God, this is the god of his idolatry.
-William B. Ullathorne
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We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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If you find yourself further from God than you were yesterday, you can be sure who has moved.
-Source Unknown
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Blessed is the man who finds out which way God is moving and then gets going in the same direction.
-Source Unknown
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
-John Updike
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Each person, makes their own terrible passion their God.
-Virgil
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God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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God is a comic, playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
-Alice Walker
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The Lord builds up Jerusalem,
And gathers nations to his Name:
His mercy melts the stubborn soul,
And makes the broken spirit whole.
He form'd the stars, those heavenly flames,
He counts their numbers, calls their names:
His wisdom's vast, and knows no bound,
A deep where all our thoughts are drown'd.
Great is our Lord, and great his might;
And all his glories infinite:
He crowns the meek, rewards the just,
And treads the wicked to the dust.
Sing to the Lord, exalt him high,
Who spreads his cloud all round the sky,
There he prepares the fruitful rain,
Nor lets the drops descend in vain.
He makes the grass the hills adorn,
And clothes the smiling fields with corn,
The beasts with food his hands supply,
And the young ravens when they cry.
What is the creature's skill or force,
The sprightly man, the warlike horse,
The nimble wit, the active limb?
All are too mean delights for him.
But saints are lovely in his sight;
He views his children with delight:
He sees their hope, he knows their fear,
And looks and loves his image there.
-Isaac Watts, Psalm 147
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The most important thought that ever occupied my mind is that of my individual responsibility to God.
-Daniel Webster
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It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.
-Simone Weil
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We can only know one thing about God -- that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
-Simone Weil
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In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; Form the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God's being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it.
-Simone Weil
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In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name. And I leave them where they are, for I know that wherever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.
-Walt Whitman
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I rarely speak about God. To God, yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But to open a discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
-Elie Wiesel
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God gets you to the plate, but once your there your on your own.
-Ted Williams
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All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Since open-mindedness and experimentation are supposed to be the indispensable attributes of our 'scientific' civilization, it seems strange that so many scientists are reluctant to try out personally the hypothesis that God came first and man afterward. They prefer to believe that man is the chance product of evolution; that God, the Creator, does not exist. I can only report that I have experimented with both concepts and that, in my case, the God concept has proved to be a better basis for living than the man-centered one. Nevertheless, I would be the first to defend your right to think as you will. I simply ask this question: in your own life, have you ever really tried to think and act as though there might be a God? Have you experimented?
-Bill Wilson, Letter, 1950
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Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.
-William Wordsworth
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If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.
-Zig Ziglar
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Books about God
