Something to Think About

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.

 That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.

Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
 

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
― C.S. Lewis 

“I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much.”
― Mother Teresa 

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis 

“People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
― Mother Teresa

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde 

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis 

“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
― Mahatma Gandhi 

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain  

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
― C.S. Lewis 

“I have faith that God will show you the answer. But you have to understand that sometimes it takes a while to be able to recognize what God wants you to do. That's how it often is. God's voice is usually nothing more than a whisper, and you have to listen very carefully to hear it. But other times, in those rarest of moments, the answer is obvious and rings as loud as a church bell.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song  

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
― C.S. Lewis  

Good-Seeds

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.  ~John Buchan
 
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.  ~G.K. Chesterton


A man without religion is like a horse without a bridle.  ~Latin Proverb

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.  ~Francis Bacon, Essays: Of Atheism, 1625
 
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.  Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.  ~Albert Einstein

I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.  ~Joe Mullally

Were the purportings of the Bible to be a revelation false, it would still be the truest book that was ever written.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827 
 

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.  ~G.K. Chesterton

My religious position:  I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me.  The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green.  The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.  ~Thomas Merton

 Any fool can count the seeds in an apple.  Only God can count all the apples in one seed.  ~Robert H. Schuller



Every evening I turn my worries over to God.  He's going to be up all night anyway.  ~Mary C. Crowley

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.  ~St. Augustine

Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.  ~James Weldon Johnson

God understands our prayers even when we can't find the words to say them.  ~Author Unknown

What we are is God's gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God.  ~Eleanor Powell

A man with God is always in the majority.  ~John Knox

Certain thoughts are prayers.  There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.  ~Victor Hugo

You can tell the size of your God by looking at the size of your worry list.  The longer your list, the smaller your God.  ~Author Unknown

Maybe the atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.  ~Author Unknown

If God had wanted to be a big secret, He would not have created babbling brooks and whispering pines.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.  ~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

The soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.  ~Edna St. Vincent Millay

God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.  ~Teresa of Avila

God's last name is not "Dammit."  ~Author Unknown

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?  ~Sylvia Plath, "Mystic"

As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.  ~Woody Allen

God:  The most popular scapegoat for our sins.  ~Mark Twain

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.  ~Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, 1937

No matter how much I prove and prod,
I cannot quite believe in God;
But oh, I hope to God that He
Unswervingly believes in me.
~E.Y. Harburg, attributed

People see God every day, they just don't recognize him.  ~Pearl Bailey

How tired God must be of guilt and loneliness, for that is all we ever bring to Him.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

God's will is not an itinerary, but an attitude.  ~Andrew Dhuse

Let God's promises shine on your problems.  ~Corrie Ten Boom

I just hope God does not get bored of dreaming me.  ~Author Unknown

By night, an atheist half believes in God.  ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."  At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.  ~George Santayana

When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily.  It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence

God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle.  I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.  ~Mother Teresa

In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all.  It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.  ~Quentin Crisp


Prayer is when you talk to God; meditation is when you listen to God.  ~Diana Robinson


Weave in faith and God will find the thread.  ~Author Unknown


They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.  ~Emily Dickinson


If you don't know what's meant by God, watch a forsythia branch or a lettuce leaf sprout.  ~Martin H. Fischer


It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.  ~Joseph Joubert


Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.  ~Garth Brooks


Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.  ~Anatole France, Le jardin d'Epicure


How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


God enters by a private door into each individual.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand.  If you understand you have failed.  ~Saint Augustine


God is not the name of God, but an opinion about Him.  ~Pope Xystus I, The Ring


God's promises are like the stars; the darker the night the brighter they shine.  ~David Nicholas


In nature we see where God has been.  In our fellow man, we see where He is still at work.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


"What do you think of God," the teacher asked.  After a pause, the young pupil replied, "He's not a think, he's a feel."  ~Paul Frost


God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.  ~Jean Paul Richter


All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1734


Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.  ~Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History


Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


Your talent is God's gift to you.  What you do with it is your gift back to God.  ~Leo Buscaglia; also, What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.  ~Hans Urs von Balthasar


God is the perfect poet.  ~Robert Browning


Remember this.  When people choose to withdraw far from a fire, the fire continues to give warmth, but they grow cold.  When people choose to withdraw far from light, the light continues to be bright in itself but they are in darkness.  This is also the case when people withdraw from God.  ~Augustine


The beckoning Hands
Of God's hopeful Smile
Will, without fail, one day greet
The fruitful cries
Of man's prayerful heart.
~Sri Chinmoy, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames


Are you wrinkled with burden?  Come to God for a faith lift.  ~Author Unknown


There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."  ~C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1943


We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter.  God is our eternal fallout shelter.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963


Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.  Really.  ~Lenny Bruce, "Religions Inc.," in The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. John Cohen, 1967


Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts and no one to thank.  ~Christina Rossetti


Life is God's novel.  Let him write it.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer


You are not obliged to put on evening clothes to meet God.  ~Austin O'Malley


When you knock, ask to see God - none of the servants.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Your mind works very simply:  you are either trying to find out what are God's laws in order to follow them; or you are trying to outsmart Him.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe in the God idea, not God himself.  ~Miguel de Unamuno


Most people wish to serve God - but only in an advisory capacity.  ~Author Unknown


Some stand on tiptoe trying to reach God to talk to him — you try too hard, friend — drop to your knees and listen, he'll hear you better that way. ~Terri Guillemets


I've been hiding from God, and I'm appalled to find how easy it is.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The self-appointed spokesmen for God incline to shout; He, Himself, speaks only in whispers.  ~Martin H. Fischer


A lot of people are willing to give God credit, but so few ever give Him cash.  ~Robert E. Harris, Laugh with the Circuit Rider


It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that when we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation - of loneliness, of poverty and misery, the end of all things, or their extreme - then rises in our mind the thought of God.  ~Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, 1937


To put one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.  ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books


So long as God reveals Himself, or doesn't, He is behaving like God.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart. ~Blaise Pascal


Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


God waits to win back his own flowers as gifts from man's hands. ~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916


God can never be a definition. He is more than even the entirety of the dictionary. ~Terri Guillemets


I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God — I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least. ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass


Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. ~Malcolm Muggeridge


Whenever I see sunbeams coming through clouds, it always looks to me like God shining himself down onto us. The thing about sunbeams is they're always there even though we can't always see them. Same with God. ~Terri Guillemets


We always keep God waiting while we admit more importunate suitors. ~Malcolm de Chazal


The sun does not shine for a few trees, and flowers, but for the wide world's joy. The lonely pine on the mountain-top waves its sombre boughs and cries, 'Thou art my sun.' And the little meadow violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, 'Thou art my sun.' And the grain in a housand fields rustles in the wind, and makes answer, 'Thou art my sun.' So God sits effulgent in heaven, not for a favoured few, but for the universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or so low that he may not look up with childish confidence and say, 'My Father, Thou art mine.' ~Henry Ward Beecher


Been taken for granted? Imagine how God feels. ~Author Unknown


Don't look for God in the sky; look within your own body. ~Osho


'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking;...
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848


How many stanzas in the springtime breeze?
How plenty the raindrops? As He doth please.
There is no meter and there is no rhyme,
Yet God's poems always read in perfect time.
~Terri Guillemets


If Creation were a crime, would not God be the prime suspect? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


How important the concept of God is, and how instead of valuing what has been given us, we with light hearts spurn it because of absurdities that have been attached to it.  ~Leo Tolstoy, Last Diaries, 1960


No pillow so soft as God's promise. ~Author Unknown


For light I go directly to the Source of light, not to any of the reflections. ~Peace Pilgrim


We are Godseekers all, though some be churchgoing believers and others pilgrims to an unknown shrine. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Some people talk about finding God — as if He could get lost. ~Author Unknown


For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread. The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.... Shall we think of the day as a chance to come nearer to our Host, and to find out something of Him who has fed us so long? ~Rebecca Harding Davis


We can never escape God's lovely essence. ~Terri Guillemets


I talk to God but the sky is empty. ~Sylvia Plath


I do not believe in God, for that implies an effort of the will - I see God everywhere!  ~Jean Favre


If you are bathed
In God's Forgiveness-Light,
Then no dust of earth
Will be able to cling to you.
~Sri Chinmoy, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames


God and I have built an immense fire together. We keep each other happy and warm. ~Hāfez


I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.  ~Voltaire


There is a tendency to see divine intervention in things that happen in the normal course of miracles.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


All that I have seen teaches me to trust God for all I have not seen.  ~Author Unknown


He who kneels before God can stand before anyone.  ~Author Unknown


Outer fire we need to cook.  Inner fire we need to liberate.  God's Fire we need to love.  ~Sri Chinmoy


Peace on the outside comes from knowing God on the inside.  ~Author Unknown


God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home.  ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886


God is with you always.  Simply turn your face to Him.  ~Kirpal Singh


Hunting God is a great adventure.  ~Marie DeFloris


My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.  ~Christopher Morley


God is a verb, not a noun proper or improper.  ~R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God, 1963


God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.  ~Timaeus of Locris


Some people always sigh in thanking God.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


When we lose God, it is not God who is lost.  ~Author Unknown


Life is a tapestry:  We are the warp; angels, the weft; God, the weaver.  Only the Weaver sees the whole design.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994


Those who never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.  ~Catherine Marshall, Christy, 1967


If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. ~Voltaire


I wear a coat of angels' breath and warm myself with His love. ~Terri Guillemets


I had a thousand questions to ask God; but when I met him they all fled and didn't seem to matter. ~Christopher Morley, Inward Ho!, 1923


I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.  ~Mary Gardiner Brainard


Availability is better than ability for God.  ~Author Unknown


God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers, who try to teach God his job as Creator.  ~Elie Faure, L'Esprit des formes, 1927


Man is born broken.  He lives by mending.  The grace of God is glue.  ~Eugene O'Neill, The Great God Brown, 1926


Peace is not the absence of affliction, but the presence of God.  ~Author Unknown


If you are not as close to God as you used to be, who moved?  ~Author Unknown


I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.  ~William Ralph Inge


When we put our cares in His hands, He puts His peace in our hearts.  ~Author Unknown


If you want to find God, hang out in the space between your thoughts. ~Alan Cohen


Before me, even as behind, God is, and all is well.  ~John Greenleaf Whittier


What is it that we all believe in that we cannot see or hear or feel or taste or smell - this invisible thing that heals all sorrows, reveals all lies and renews all hope?  What is it that has always been and always will be, from whose bosom we all came and to which we will all return?  Most call it Time.  A few realize that it is God.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Exercise daily.  Walk with the Lord!  ~Author Unknown


Be God or let God.  ~Author Unknown


I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. ~Carl Jung


We strive to be God's worthy audience. ~Terri Guillemets


God left so many fingerprints at the scene of Creation that you wonder — does He want to be found, or does He want to be stopped? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


God is the tangential point between zero and infinity. ~Alfred Jarry, Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll Pataphysicien, 1911


Every morning I spend fifteen minutes filling my mind full of God; and so there's no room left for worry thoughts. ~Howard Chandler Christy


I believe in the sun even if it isn't shining.  I believe in love even when I am alone.  I believe in God even when He is silent.  ~Author Unknown


Darkness cannot put out the Light.  It can only make God brighter.  ~Author Unknown


No God, no peace.  Know God, know peace.  ~Author Unknown


You ask:  what is the meaning or purpose of life?  I can only answer with another question:  do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?  ~Freeman Dyson, quoted in The Meaning of Life, compiled by Hugh S. Moorhead 

The purpose of all major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts. ~Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.  ~John Updike, Self-Consciousness, 1989


A religion without the element of mystery would not be a religion at all.  ~Edwin Lewis


It is doubtless true that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries.  ~Karl Menninger

  

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