This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Religion is not a perpetual moping over good books. Religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances, these are necessary to religion - no man can be religious without them. But religion is mainly and chiefly the glorifying of god amid the duties and trials of the world; the guiding of our course amid adverse winds and currents of temptation by the sunlight of duty and the compass of Divine truth, the bearing up manfully, wisely, courageously, for the honor of Christ, our great Leader in the conflict of life." - John Caird
"The cloud which appeared to the prophet Ezekiel carried with it winds and storms, but it was environed with a golden circle, to teach us that the storms of afflictions, which happen to God’s children, are encompassed with brightness and smiling felicity." - Nicolas Caussin
"How simply I can trust in man, and how little in God! How unreasonable is a pure act of faith in one like ourselves, if we cannot repose the same faith in God." - Richard Cecil
"I could write down twenty cases, wherein I wished God had done otherwise than he did; but which I now see, had I had my own will, would have led to extensive mischief. The life of a Christian is a life of paradoxes." - Richard Cecil
"I extend the circle of real religion very widely. Many men fear God, and love God, and have sincere desire to serve him, whose views of religious truth are very imperfect, and in some points utterly false. But may not many such persons have a state of heart acceptable before God?" - Richard Cecil
"There are but two classes of the wise; the men who serve God because they have found him, and the men who seek him because they have found him not." - Richard Cecil
"Music is the language of praise; and one of the most essential preparations for eternity is delight in praising God; a higher acquirement, I do think, than even delight and devotedness to prayer." - Allan Chalmers, fully Allan Knight Chalmers
"God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages." - William Ellery Channing
"The mind in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven." - William Ellery Channing
"Each things lives according to its kind; the heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature of man by intimate communion with God." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty." - Stephen Charnock
"There is no religion without mystery. God Himself is the great secret of Nature." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"As a man goes down in self, he goes up in God." - George Barrell Cheever
"The man who can really, in living union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, finds in the material forms around him, a source of power and happiness inexhaustible, and like the life of angels. The highest life and glory of man is to be alive unto God; and when this grandeur of sensibility to him, and this power of communion with him is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of heaven." - George Barrell Cheever
"God made freedom, man made slavery." - Joseph Chénier, fully Marie-Joseph Blaise de Chénier
"Nature is exhaustessly reproductive... Mother Earth cares for her children. The landscape of the farm is full of divine feeling and rich in suggestion that inspire calm and quicken industry. It throbs with the tender heart of God. It is alive. In its simple and steady processes it reveals the Father’s care for His children." -
"Science is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God." - Frances Power Cobbe
"Art-for art's sake (and) art-for-people's sake are equally ridiculous. I suggest art for God's sake." - Jean Cocteau
"Ethics is the vital principle of Judaism. Its religion aims to be, and is, moral doctrine. Love of God is knowledge of God, and that is knowledge of the ultimate moral purpose of mankind." - Hermann Cohen
"We neither (never) know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us; God alone judges, and knows too." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best." - Robert Collyer
"A natural law is a process, not a power: it is a method of operation, not an operator. A natural law, without God behind it, is no more than a glove without a hand in it." - Joseph Cook
"Why fear tomorrow, timid heart? Why tread the future's way? We only need to do our part Today, dear child, today. The past is written! Close the book On pages sad and gay; Within the future do not look, But live today-today. "Tis this one hour that God has given; His now we must obey; And it will make our earth his heaven To live today-today." - Lydia Avery Coonley Ward
"The very nearest approach to domestic happiness on earth is in the cultivation on both sides of absolute unselfishness. Never both be angry at once. Never talk at one another, either alone or in company. Never speak loud to one another unless the house is on fire. Let each; one strive to yield oftenest to the wishes of the other. Let self-denial be the daily aim and practice of each. Never find fault unless it is perfectly certain that a fault has been committed, and always speak lovingly. Never taunt with a past mistake. Neglect the whole world besides rather than one another. Never allow a request to be repeated. Never make a remark at the expense of each other, it is a meanness. Never part for a day without loving words to think of during absence. Never meet without a loving welcome. Never let the sun go down upon any anger or grievance. Never let any fault you have committed go by until you have frankly confessed it and asked forgiveness. Never forget the happy hours of early love. Never sigh over what might have been, but make the best of what is. Never forget that marriage is ordained of God, and that His blessing alone can make it what it should ever be. Never be contented till you know you are both walking in the narrow way. Never let your hopes stop short of the eternal home." -
"God gave man work, not to burden him, but to bless him, and useful work, willingly, cheerfully, effectively done, has always been the finest expression of the human spirit." - Walter R. Courtenay
"Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, on of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite." - Victor Cousin
"Happy the man who sees a God employed in all the good and ill that checker life." - William Cowper
"I believe, with all my heart, that the Spirit of God is within every man, however mean, ugly, or diseased; and that when we visit indignities upon other men, we are affronting our Creator, and we are also harming ourselves." - Bartley Crum, fully Bartley Cavanaugh Crum
"Conversation by the Holy Spirit is a spiritual illumination of the soul. God’s grace lights up the dark heart." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
"It is the easiest thing in the world for us to obey God when He command us to do what we like, and to trust Him when the path is all sunshine. The real victory of faith is to trust God in the dark, and through the dark. Let us be assured of this, that if the lesson and the rod are of His appointing, and that His all-wise love has engineered the deep tunnel of trial on the heavenward road, He will never desert us during the discipline. The vital thing for us is not to deny and desert Him." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
"The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God’s joke on humanity. It is man’s last desperate stand at superintendency." - Bette Davis, Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis
"When man substituted God for the Great Goddess he at the same time substituted authoritarian for humanistic values." - Elizabeth Gould Davis
"God speaks to our hearts through the voice of remorse." - François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis
"Duty is above all consequences, and often, at a crisis of difficulty, commands us to throw them overboard. It commands us to look neither to the right, nor to the left, but straight onward. Hence every act of duty is an act of faith. It is performed in the assurance that God will take care of the consequences, and will so order the course of the world, that, whatever the immediate results may be, His word shall not return to Him void." -
"Every one comes between men's souls and God, either as a wall or as a bridge. Either you are leading men to God or you are driving them away." - Lindsay Dewar, fully Canon Lindsay Dewar, D.D
"Fear builds prison walls around a man and bars him in with dreads, anxieties and timid doubts. Faith is the great liberator from prison walls. Fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages, fear sickens, faith heals; fear puts hopelessness at the heart of life, while faith sees beyond the horizon and rejoices in its God." - Lewis L. Dunnington
"Religion is the reaching out of one's whole being - mind, body, spirit, emotions, intuitions, affections, will - for completion, for inner unity, for true relation with those about us, for right relation to the universe in which we live. Religion is life, a certain kind of life, life as it should and could be, a life of harmony within and true adjustment without - life, therefore, in harmony with the life of God himself." - Henry P. Van Dusen
"God is Mind, and God is infinite; hence all is Mind." - Mary Baker Eddy
"Nature and revelation are alike God's books; each may have mysteries, but in each there are plain practical lessons for everyday duty." - Tyron Edwards
"Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its tempter, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self and benevolence to men." - Tyron Edwards
"Before God we are all equally wise - equally foolish." - Albert Einstein
"God is a Scientist, not a magician." - Albert Einstein
"I can't believe that God plays dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein
"I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element; I want to know his thoughts; the rest are details." - Albert Einstein
"In the first place, the human mind, no matter how highly trained, is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many tongues. The little child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind to God. And because I believe this, I am not an atheist." - Albert Einstein
"It seems hard to sneak a look at a God's cards. But that he plays dice and uses "telepathic" methods (as the present quantum theory requires of him) is something that I cannot believe for a single moment." - Albert Einstein
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God." - Albert Einstein