Skip to content

God Quotes

The writers with the most entries are not theologians: a Sufi saint, Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, then Shakespeare, Homer, Pope and Ovid. The sourced lines are mostly sceptical ones. Bertrand Russell, in Religion and Science (1935), says that with omnipotence and millions of years he would not think Man much to boast of, and Shaw, in 1903, warns against the man whose god is in the skies.

Three famous sayings are marked disputed. Voltaire’s clockwork-and-clockmaker line has no firm source. Newton’s remark that the thumb would convince him of God is reported from a palmistry article in Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round (1864). “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God,” credited to Yuri Gagarin, is traced in the notes only to a 2006 book.

Random quote on God

Most quoted on god:

To the extent that we are free we are like God, who has no need of an idea of a God over Godself or of an incentive other than the moral law itself. But to the extent that we are also natural beings, we desire our own happiness in everything else that we desire, and we need the practical postulate of God to bring that happiness together with morality.

John E. Hare Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments (2011)

There is no god but God! — to prayer — lo!
God is great!

Lord Byron

And you never ask questions/When God’s on your side /If God’s on our side/They’ll stop the next war

Bob Dylan

The first act of man, filled and carried away with enthusiasm (of the divine breath), is to adore the invisible Providence on which he feels that he depends, and which he calls GOD.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

If there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Russell's Best (1958)

Don't you know there ain't no devil? There's only God when He's drunk.

Tom Waits

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah

Of what I call God,
And fools call Nature.

Robert Browning

'Twas much, that man was made like God before:
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

John Donne

He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.

Euripides

He from thick films shall purge the visual ray,
And on the sightless eyeball pour the day.

Alexander Pope

Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.

Protagoras

Let the crowd delight in things of no value; to me let the golden-haired Apollo minister full cups from the Castalian spring (the fountain of Parnassus).

Ovid

The god we now behold with opened eyes,
A herd of spotted panthers round him lies
In glaring forms; the grapy clusters spread
On his fair brows, and dangle on his head.

Ovid

Whoever believes in a God at all, believes in an infinite mystery; and if the existence of God is such an infinite mystery, we can very well expect and afford to have many of His ways mysterious to us.

Ichabod Spencer Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

The existence of God is attested by everything that appeals to our imagination. And if our eye cannot reach Him it is because He has not permitted our intelligence to go so far.

Napoleon Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

The very pure spirit does not bother about the regard of others or human respect, but communes inwardly with God, alone and in solitude as to all forms, and with delightful tranquility, for the knowledge of God is received in divine silence.

John of the Cross

Doesn’t that sound like God to you? This big stupid, invulnerable thing that resembles us and whose creations are more intelligent than it is? The Bible left out that part, but it would explain a great deal.

Lucius Shepard The Skinny Girl (2011)

We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little more information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He astonishes us.

Herman Melville

There is nothing which God cannot do.

Cicero

Related topics