Great Throughts Treasury

""What did God ever make such a world for anyway?" one young person complained, adding, "I could make a better world than this myself." "That", a friend suggested, " is just the reason God put you into this world - to make it a better world. Now go ahead and do your part."" -

"A conscience void of offense, before God and man, is an inheritance for eternity." - Daniel Webster

"The laughter of man is the contentment of God." - John Weiss

"Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all, ever since what might be call’d thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance to justify the ways of God to man... which is the foundation of moral America... to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism through Time." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways but that man or woman is as good as God? And that there is no God any more divine than yourself." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Fear of God builds churches but love of God builds men." - Louis O. Williams

"Faith is the marriage of God and the Soul." -

"The goods of God, which are beyond all measure, can only be contained in an empty and solitary heart." -

"The soul of one who serves God always swims in joy, always keeps a holiday, is always in her palace of jubilation, ever singing with fresh ardor and fresh pleasure a new song of joy and love." -

"The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union. For whether it be a strong wire rope or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really holds it fast; for, until the cord is broken, the bird cannot fly. so the soul, held by the bonds of human affections, however slight they may be, cannot, while they last, make its way to God." -

"The worth of love does not consist in high feelings, but in detachment, in patience under all trials for the sake of God whom we love." -

"The reward of the souls in the world beyond is their ability to attain the true concept of God which is a source of the most wonderful felicity, an attainment impossible for man in this early life because of the disturbances on the part of matter." - Isaac Abravanel, fully Don Itshak ben Yehouda Abravanel

"Anyone whose reward from God is deferred until tomorrow has not truly worshipped Him today." - Abu Yazid Tayfur ibn 'Isa ibn Surushan al-Bismtami

"Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God. Whoever knows God through God becomes alive, and whoever knows God through self becomes dead." - Abu Yazid Tayfur ibn 'Isa ibn Surushan al-Bismtami

"That the individual man should seek to know himself for what he really is and should esteem himself for his true worth make inevitable his desire to be known and esteemed by others according to his merits... God alone is the judge of one’s ultimate worth, and virtue is its own reward." -

"Only those who have suffered and endured greatly have achieved greatly... Man has ever risen nearer to God by the alter-stairs of pain and sorrow." - Samuel Adler

"The devil is very near at hand to those who, like monarchs are accountable to none but god for their actions." - Gustavus Adolphus, Gustavus II

"I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in god - a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge - adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown." -

"Religion condemns religion. It is not the school that is without God, it is the Church that is without God." - Alain Pen name of Emile-Auguste Chartier

"There is no success with God, nor is there failure before him." - Amen-em-apt NULL

"Happiness has no limits, because God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love." -

"The whole secret of remaining young in spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthusiasm in oneself, by poetry, by contemplation, by charity, - that is, in fewer words, the maintenance of harmony in the soul. When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in its right place within us, we ourselves are in equilibrium with the whole work of God. Deep and grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and the eternal order, reason touched with emotion and a serene tenderness of heart - these surely are the foundations of wisdom." -

"Every man's life is a fairy-tale written by God's fingers." - Hans Christian Anderson

"Time is so fleeting that if we do not remember God in our youth, age may find us incapable of thinking about him." - Hans Christian Anderson

"My soul is God, my soul is eternity." - Ani NULL

"God thinks within geniuses, dreams within poets, and sleeps within the rest of us." -

"One universe made up of all that is; and one God in it all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"By the one same act man both serves and worships God, for worship regards the excellence of God, to Whom reverence is due: while service regards the subjection of man who, by his condition, is under an obligation of showing reverence to God. To these two belong all acts ascribed to religion, because, by them all, man bears witness to the Divine excellence and to his own subjection to God, either by offering something to God, or by assuming something Divine." -

"He who considers absolutely the highest cause of the whole universe, namely God, is most of all called wise." -

"Religion directs man to God not as its object but as its end." -

"To know God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, since God is man’s happiness. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man must be naturally known to him. This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists." -

"Religion is a hunger for beauty and love and glory. It is wonder and the mystery and majesty, passion and ecstasy. It is emotion as well as mind, feeling as well as knowing, the subjective as well as the objective. It is the heart soaring to heights the head alone will never know; the apprehension of meanings science alone will never find; the awareness of values ethics alone will never reveal. It is the human spirit yearning for, and finding, something infinitely greater than itself which it calls God." - Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow

"Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things, but in doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Neglect nothing; the most trivial action may be performed to God." - Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld, or Arnault, called La Mère Angélique

"Pray to God for nothing except what you can pray for openly." - Athenodorus Cananiters

"Liberty is from God; liberties form the Devil." - Berthold Auerbach

"Before God can deliver us we must undeceive ourselves." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"Faith is to believe, on the word of God, what we do not see, and its reward is to see and enjoy what we believe." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"He only can attain to virtue who knows and imitates God - which knowledge and imitation are the only cause of blessedness... for philosophy is directed to the obtaining of the blessed life, and he who loves God is blessed in the enjoyment of God." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"If there is free will, all things do not happen according to fate; if all things do not happen according to fate, there is not a certain order of causes; and if there is not a certain order of causes, neither is there a certain order of things foreknown by God - for things cannot come to pass except they are preceded by efficient causes - but if there is no fixed and certain order of causes foreknown by God, all things cannot be said to happen according as He foreknew that they would happen... But it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God and is embraced by His foreknowledge, for human wills are also causes of human actions; and He Who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it. This seems, indeed, to be contradictory, that loftiness should debase and lowliness exalt. But pious humility enables us to submit to what is above us; and nothing is more exalted above us than God; and therefore humility, by making us subject to God, exalts us. But pride, being a defect of nature, by the very act of refusing subjection and revolution from Him who is supreme, falls to a low condition." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"When one has this intelligent self-love is commanded to love his neighbor as himself, what else is enjoined than that he shall do all in his power to commend to him the love of God? This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this right piety, this the service due to God only." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"A simple-minded believer would say, ‘God is in Heaven.’ A man of trained mind, knowing that God must be represented as a physical entity in space, would say, ‘God is everywhere, and not merely in Heaven.’ But if the omnipresence of God be taken only in a physical and spatial sense, that formula, too, is likely in error. Accordingly, the philosopher more adequately expresses the purely spiritual nature of God when he asserts that God is nowhere but in Himself; in fact, rather than say that God is in spaced he might more justly say that space and matter are in God." - Averroes, full name ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd NULL

"Six hundred and thirteen commandments were given to Moses. King David came and reduced them to eleven (Psalms XV). The prophet Isaiah further reduced them to six (Isaiah XXXIII) Micah (VI, 8) reduced them to three: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God." - Babylonian Talmud

"Truth is the seal of God." - Babylonian Talmud

"When a thief is breaking into a house, he calls on God to help him." - Babylonian Talmud

"Service of God consists in what we do to our neighbor." - Leo Baeck

"The purpose of prayer is to leave us alone with God." - Leo Baeck

"It is in God that morality has its foundation and guarantee." - Leo Baeck

"Any heart turned God-ward, feels more joy in one short hour of prayer, than e'er was raised by all the feasts on earth since its foundation." - Gamaliel Bailey

"Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert though which rings the voice of God." - Honoré de Balzac