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.
God willeth that we endlessly hate the sin and endlessly love the soul, as God loveth it.
A man who recognizes no God is probably placing an inordinate value on himself.
There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
Shakes his ambrosial curls, and gives the nod,
The stamp of fate, and sanction of the god.
Jove weighs affairs of earth in dubious scales,
And the good suffers while the bad prevails.
What can we say about metaphysical naturalism? Again, I want to make two points.