Quotes to inspire and reflect

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

Men always love what is good or what they find good; it is in judging what is good that they go wrong.

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

It is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.

The good things of life are not to he had singly, hut come to us with a mixture; like a schoolboy’s holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.

We must take the good with the bad; / For the good when it’s good, is so very good / That the bad when it’s bad can’t be bad!

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.

We look for good on earth and cannot recognize it / when met.

Whatever befalls in accordance with nature should be accounted good.

Almost, I am tempted to say, I will believe in God, yes, in spite of the church and the ministers.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God’s dust is greater than your idol.

We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the Universe.

God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

Who created all this? Yasha would ask himself. Was it the sun? If so, then perhaps the sun was God. Yasha had read in some holy book that Abraham had worshiped the sun before accepting the existence of Jehovah.

We have been born under a monarchy; to obey God is freedom.

Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.

But who can speak to God, or rather who can’t? The question is, who can get an answer?

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

God, he whom everyone knows, by name.

It is God that accomplishes all term to hopes, / God, who overtakes the flying eagle, outpasses the dolphin / in the sea; who bends under his strength the man with thoughts too high.

If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest.

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.

The heart is a mystery—not a puzzle that can’t be solved, but a mystery in the religious sense: unfathomable, beyond manipulation, showing traces of the finger of God.

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.

’Tis heaven alone that is given away, / 'Tis only God may be had for the asking.

To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.

The First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

If any man obeys the gods, they listen to him also.

God lies ahead. I convince myself and constantly repeat to myself that: He depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.

I have never wished there was a God to call on—

The way of God is complex, he is hard / for us to predict. He moves the pieces and they come / somehow into a kind of order.

If god is truly god, he is perfect, / lacking nothing.

The only money of God is God. He pays never with any thing less, or any thing else.

Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.

God is our name for the last generalization to which we can arrive.

If every gnat that flies were an archangel, all that could but tell me that there is a God; and the poorest worm that creeps tells me that.

God is indeed a jealous God— / He cannot bear to see / That we had rather not with Him / But with each other play.

Though God’s attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice.

God is for men and religion for women.

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?

Man appoints, and God disappoints.

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.

Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army.