God

"Is God love? Like all characterizations of God, this one presumes more insight than I feel in possession of. But there's certainly something to the idea that love is connected to, indeed emanates from, the kind of God whose existence is being surmised here. The connection comes via love's connection to the moral order of which that God is the source. The moral order has revealed itself through ever-widening circles of non-zero-sumness that draw people toward the moral truth that mutual respect is warranted. As we saw […], it is the moral imagination whose growth often paves the way for that truth, and it does so through the extension of a kind of sympathy, a subjective identification with the situation of the other. And as sympathy intensifies it approaches love. Love, you might say, is the apotheosis of the moral imagination; it can foster the most intimate identification with the other, the most intense appreciation of the moral worth of the other."

"When I speak of All That Is, you must understand my position within it. All That Is knows no other. This does not mean that there may not be more to know. It does not mean, and here words quite fail us, it does not mean that All That Is, in any terms we can conceive of, may not be limited. It knows of no other."

"Thou, my all! My theme! my inspiration! and my crown! My strength in age—my rise in low estate! My souls ambition, pleasure, wealth!—my world! My light in darkness! and my life in death! My boast through time! bliss through eternity! Eternity, too short to speak thy praise! Or fathom thy profound of love to man!"

"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron."

"I think God is as much a basic ingredient in the universe as neutrons and positrons . . . God is, for lack of a better term, clout. This is the prime force, when we look around the universe."

"The gods of all pagan faiths have been allied with the rich rulers. The priests of most religions are the employees of the landowners. But the God of Israel has always claimed to be with the poor—whether in the legislation of Deuteronomy, the words of the prophets, or the experiences of the New Testament. Our God is on the side of the poor."

"A thought struck me abruptly: My God, you do exist, then. There are proofs of Your existence. I had forgotten them all, and never demanded any either, for what an overwhelming obligation would come with this certainty. And yet that is what is now being shown to me."

""," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still."

"To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning."

"Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same."

"The god of many cannot remain the true god."

"All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent."

"I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature"."

"The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation."

"I do not belong to any church, but I do consider myself a religious man...part of the creative and intelligence behind life. Therefore, if we are part of God than our lives are not brief meaningless things, but rather have a great importance and significance."

"Lucifer: God? God is love. I don't love you."

"All true knowledge of God begins with the knowledge of his hiddenness."

"God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing."

"Arthur Frayn: "And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?""

"He who is called Brahman by the jnanis is known as Atman by the yogis and as Bhagavan by the bhaktas. The same brahmin is called priest, when worshipping in the temple, and cook, when preparing a meal in the kitchen. The jnani, following the path of knowledge, always reason about the Reality saying, "not this, not this." Brahman is neither "this" nor "that"; It is neither the universe nor its living beings. Reasoning in this way, the mind becomes steady. Finally it disappears and the aspirant goes into samadhi. This is the Knowledge of Brahman. It is the unwavering conviction of the jnani that Brahman alone is real and the world is illusory. All these names and forms are illusory, like a dream. What Brahman is cannot be described. One cannot even say that Brahman is a Person. This is the opinion of the jnanis, the followers of Vedanta. But the bhaktas accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They don't think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of the God's power and glory. God has created all these — sky, stars, moon, sun, mountains, ocean, men, animals. They constitute His glory. He is within us, in our hearts. Again, He is outside. The most advanced devotees say that He Himself has become all this — the 24 cosmic principles, the universe, and all living beings. The devotee of God wants to eat sugar, and not become sugar. (All laugh.) Do you know how a lover of God feels? His attitude is: "O God, Thou art the Master, and I am Thy servant. Thou art the Mother, and I Thy child." Or again: "Thou art my Father and Mother. Thou art the Whole, and I am a part." He does not like to say, "I am Brahman." They yogi seeks to realize the Paramatman, the Supreme Soul. His ideal is the union of the embodied soul and the Supreme Soul. He withdraws his mind from sense objects and tries to concentrate on the Paramatman. Therefore, during the first stage of his spiritual discipline, he retires into solitude and with undivided attention practices meditation in a fixed posture. But the reality is one and the same; the difference is only in name. He who is Brahman is verily Atman, and again, He is the Bhagavan. He is Brahman to the followers of the path of knowledge, Paramatman to the yogis, and Bhagavan to the lovers of God."

"Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and suppose they mean something shared by all? — Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. ... Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him?"

"I sit and talk to God And he just laughs at my plans"

"One thing I can't stand, it's people groveling."

"Once you accept the existence of God — however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him — then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things. You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage."

"To assume that one’s existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God."

"I don't have much truck with the "religion is the cause of most of our wars" school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God. I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I'm happy they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet."

"I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from."

"If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth."

"Dear God I've heard your name from teachers, family and friends, you made the universe and so will live on when it ends. Everyone I know admits they’ve never seen your face, they’re not sure where you live and have no map to the place."

"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature's God."

"There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."

"No man — prince, peasant, pope, — has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!""

"He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind."

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

"An honest man's the noblest work of God."

"The first act of man, filled and carried away with enthusiasm (of the divine breath), is to adore the invisible Providence on which he feels that he depends, and which he calls GOD."

"Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!"

"To Him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, He bounds, connects and equals all!"

"For modern man, … pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. … In effect his becomes a deification of his own will; man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God."

"The first thing that we know about ourselves is our imperfection."

"God is a geometrician."

"Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, But vindicate the ways of God to man."

"God's greatness and goodness are measured by the fact that he gives us choices. He doesn't require us to thank him for our food. (In case you hadn't noticed.) God is not a Modernist. He doesn't view us as nails. God expects us to behave like carpenters. Indeed, he gave us a carpenter as an example. So I think God is postmodern. He has his own ideas of what rules, and what sucks, and he doesn't expect everyone else to agree with him."

"God is truth and light his shadow."

"In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled — that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist."

"Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this super-existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name. It is and it is as no other being is."

"Also, if you read attentively and objectively the "Letter about God": in The Mahatma Letters, you will see that the Mahatma repudiates the sacrilegious and anthropomorphic conception of a Personal god—cruel and unjust, chastising with eternal damnation all so-called heretics, and justifying all the crimes committed in his Holy Name! Verily, such a God cannot have a Mahatma's approval and respect."

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."

"You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters... Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction."

"The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure."