Bev > Bev's Quotes

“The destiny of your soul is not predicated upon acceptance of a specific dogma that happens to be "correct." A loving God does not dole out eternal condemnation because one has selected the wrong doctrine or misinterpreted scripture. On the contrary, your endeavor to understand God and the nature of the universe is a testament to your devotion.”
― Mark Ireland

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”
― Albert Einstein

“Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.”
― Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
― Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.”
― John Lennon

“I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish it; it's my joy to cure it.”
― William P. Young, The Shack

“Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Man - a figment of God's imagination.”
― Mark Twain

“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”
― Nicolas Chamfort

“Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”
― Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year

“God save us from religion.”
― David Eddings

“I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, Darwinia

“wonder what day god created the egg' 'how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks'. 'eat a egg”
― Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.”
― Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner: A Portrait of the Epic Film

“I believe that people who are devoutly religious, within any specific religion, have no true respect for the ultimate vastness that is God.”
― Clair Huffaker, The Cowboy and the Cossack

“We imagine that our theological/conceptual systems are the means by which we know God as God is. I truly believe that such postures and perspectives put us in danger of conceptual idolatry, worshiping our ideas of and frameworks for God.”
― Tim Keel, Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos

“The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”
― Carl Sagan

“It is said that God has created man in his own image. But it may be that humankind has created God in the image of humankind.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers

“Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
― Albert Einstein

“Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God's being present in the mess of our unfixedness. (Messy Spirituality)”
― Michael Yaconelli

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright, Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture

“What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”
― Richard Dawkins

“God is love," she said. "And he respects love, whether it's between a parents, and child, a man and woman, or friends. I don't think he cares about religion one little bit. Live your life right. Love with all your heart. Don't hurt others, and help those in need. That is all you need to know. And don't worry about heaven. If it exists, you'll be welcome.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Burned

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
― A.W. Tozer

“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”
― Arthur Schopenhauer