The mind which is alert, watchful, which is free of fear, is an innocent mind; and it is only the innocent mind that can understand reality, truth or God.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
—Samuel Butler
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.
—Joseph Campbell
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
—Annie Dillard
An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.
—Carl Sagan
The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained.… They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
—Walt Whitman
They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
—Emily Dickinson
We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important.
—Joseph Campbell
A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I do not believe in God, but I have a sense of the infinite.
—Robert Desnos
Dear Lord, I'm so grateful I'm still loved.
—Vivien Leigh
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
—Voltaire
Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly all nature seeks God and works toward him.
—Meister Eckhart