Quotes by American Authors - Page 3291

How come when mortals want things, their only option is to make a deal with Hell and sell their soul? Why can’t they make deals with God in exchange for good behavior?"It was another of those rare moments when I’d surprised Carter. I waited for the glib answer I’d mentioned to Seth, something along the lines of goodness being its own reward. The angel considered for several seconds. "Humans make those deals all the time," he said finally. "They just don’t make them with God.""Then who are they making them with?" I exclaimed."Themselves.
Richelle Mead
I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me
Donald Miller
Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.
Cormac McCarthy
We are women, and my plea is Let me be a woman, holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is.
Elisabeth Elliot
When faith replaces doubt, when selfless service eliminates selfish striving, the power of God brings to pass His purposes.
Thomas S. Monson
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
Christopher Hitchens
Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
Lenny Bruce
My arms are too short to box with God.
Johnny Cash
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Cormac McCarthy
The irony is that while God doesn’t need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don’t really want Him most of the time.
Francis Chan
Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?
John Fante
It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.
Madeleine L'Engle
People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
Anne Rice
Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts." The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.
Rob Bell
I have found God, but he is insufficient.
Henry Miller
One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..
Joel Osteen
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
Chuck Palahniuk
If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my sould to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end.
James Frey
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
Anne Lamott
I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.
Elizabeth Gilbert
I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
Madeleine L'Engle
Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what's been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it's been full of sorrow or anger, or even when you're questioning why terrible things have to happen.
Nicholas Sparks
Quit questioning God and start trusting Him!
Joel Osteen
Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...
H.P. Lovecraft
I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.
Donald Miller
I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.
A.W. Tozer
Greed is your god, Kaz."He almost laughed at that. "No, Inej. Greed bows to me. It is my servant and my lever.
Leigh Bardugo
The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
Albert Einstein
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
Chuck Palahniuk
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
Christopher Hitchens
But God doesn't call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn't come through.
Francis Chan
Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.
Alan W. Watts
You can get a thousand no's from people, and only one "yes" from God.
Tyler Perry
Men trust God by risking rejection. Women trust God by waiting.
Carolyn McCulley
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.After that I liked jazz music.Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.
Donald Miller
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Albert Einstein
The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.
Sam Harris
We almost made it to thirty seconds without an insult. I think we set a new record.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.
Rob Bell
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.
Robert M. Pirsig
Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.
Dan Brown
Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.
Criss Jami
God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is 'no'.
Dan Brown
All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.
Octavia E. Butler
I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off.
Chuck Palahniuk
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
David Foster Wallace
Let us never forget to pray. God lives. He is near. He is real. He is not only aware of us but cares for us. He is our Father. He is accessible to all who will seek Him.
Gordon B. Hinckley
Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.
Dean Koontz
Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.
Elizabeth Gilbert
He - and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he, because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.
George Carlin
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
Alice Walker
She glared at me like she was about to punch me, but then she did something that surprised me even more. She kissed me."Be careful seaweed brain." She said putting on her invisible cap and disappearing.I probably would have sat there all day, trying to remember my name, but then the sea demons came.
Rick Riordan
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.
Erma Bombeck
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
Sylvia Plath
Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Harper Lee
I have faith that God will show you the answer. But you have to understand that sometimes it takes a while to be able to recognize what God wants you to do. That's how it often is. God's voice is usually nothing more than a whisper, and you have to listen very carefully to hear it. But other times, in those rarest of moments, the answer is obvious and rings as loud as a church bell.
Nicholas Sparks