How can one accept—let alone enjoy—aging in a culture where God is twenty-five; where advertisements are filled with twenty-somethings in halter tops and tight t-shirts, unless the ad is for a drug to treat incontinence, high blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol? What about the wisdom of age? What about endurance? What about the beauty of a face etched by years that were not always easy?
—Genie Zeiger
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
—Pablo Picasso
Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky: that should be enough contact with God in one day to make anyone crazy.
—Hafiz
I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.
—Fran Lebowitz
So many gods, so many creeds, / so many paths that wind and wind, / While just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
—Alice Walker
Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
—Flannery O'Connor
God is not a continent, like Antarctica, lying off somewhere, inert, without relation to human life till some Scott or Amundsen or Byrd finds him. God is not a mountain peak to which travelers must go and which they climb step by step. God is like the air we breathe or the earth beneath our feet. To discover God is simply to awaken to reality. It is like a plant discovering the sun and the rain that drew it from the earth or like children discovering the parents who gave them birth and love and nurture.
—Luther A. Weigle
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.… I have the immense joy of being a member of a race in which God became incarnate.… There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
—Thomas Merton
Justice is like the kingdom of God—it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great yearning.
—George Eliot
I can find God in nature, in animals, in birds and the environment.
—Pat Buckley
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting… but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.
—Kurt Vonnegut
God has… ordered things that we may learn to bear one another's burdens; for there is no man without his faults, none without his burden. None is sufficient unto himself; none is wise in himself; therefore, we must support one another, comfort, help, teach, and advise one another.
—Thomas à Kempis
Once, perhaps, the God-intoxicated few could abscond to the wild frontiers, the forests, the desert places to keep alive the perennial wisdom that they harbored. But no longer. They must now become a political force or their tradition perishes. Soon enough, there will be no solitude left for the saints to roam but its air will shudder with a noise of great engines that drowns out all prayers.
—Theodore Roszak
The grandeur of nature is only the beginning. Beyond the grandeur is God.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel