Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.

Henry David Thoreau

Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

Henry David Thoreau

It is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or acknowledge the personality of God. Some Earl of Bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. It is a sad mistake.

Henry David Thoreau

It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know what I mean.

Henry David Thoreau

I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me.

Henry David Thoreau

Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ...

Henry David Thoreau

It's only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God.

Henry David Thoreau

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

Henry David Thoreau

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

H. L. Mencken

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

If there wasn't a God we would have to invent one to keep people sane.

Jerry Falwell

One reason, of course, as a Christian, I believe the Bible is the word of God. I take the Bible as the standard.

Jerry Falwell

Life is supposed to be lived for God and for others.

Jerry Falwell

I feel most ministers who claim they've heard God's voice are eating too much pizza before they go to bed at night, and it's really an intestinal disorder, not a revelation.

Jeff Smith

How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't under'stand.

Jean Rostand

On tue un homme, on est un assassin. On tue des millions d'hommes, on est un conquérant. On les tue tous, on est un dieu. Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.

Jean Rostand

God, that checkroom of our dreams.

Jean de La Fontaine

What God does, He does well.

Groucho Marx

Patience is the art of finding something else to do.

Harriet Martineau

The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when. . . the worshiper not only sees God everywhere, but sees nothing which is not full of God.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian Church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protest injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved-but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.

Harper Lee

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

Homer

Whoever obeys the gods, to him they particularly listen.

Horace Bushnell

Be an observer of providence; for God is showing you ever, by the way in which He leads you, whither He means to lead. Study your trials, your talents, the world's wants, and stand ready to serve God now, in whatever He brings to your hand.

Gottfried Leibniz

It is God who is the ultimate reason things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.

Gottfried Leibniz

According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.

Gottfried Leibniz

We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.

Gottfried Leibniz

I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.

Gore Vidal

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.

James D. Watson

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5

James Brown

Thank God that I had the ability to understand that I had a different beat and that I was a drummer.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.