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.
As a man is, so is his God; therefore God was so often an object of mockery.
Gods are like that. It isn't enough for them to run everything. They want to be famous, too.
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
And to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.
The basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.