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.
We all of us try to make God in our image. It is one of the worst of our temptations.
That day I shall always recollect with grief; with reverence also, for the gods so willed it.
Nor let a god come in, unless the difficulty be worthy of such an intervention.
The gods give that man some profit to whom they are propitious.
One sole God;
One sole ruler, — his Law;
One sole interpreter of that law — Humanity.
Consider lost all the time in which you do not think of divinity.