Passages about god and faith

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.

Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.

Some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me.

Many things are terrible and wonderful, and nothing is more terrible and wonderful than man.

I was not born to share in hatred, but to share in love.

Dionysus opens the play by naming himself, saying he has come to Thebes disguised as a man because his mother's sisters denied that Zeus fathered him and called her death a punishment for a lie.

Tiresias tells Pentheus that the new god gives wine, which relieves men of pain and gives them sleep, and that a city gains nothing by fighting a power it cannot see.

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?

I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Nothing can ever be begotten of nothing by divine will.

The existence of God can be proved in five ways.

Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

Two loves, then, have made two cities.

Remove justice, and what is a kingdom but a great band of robbers?

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in!

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence, that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe

That to the height of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body; which means nothing other than that he will be forced to be free.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust. Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.

Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Stay a while! You are so beautiful!

All men by nature desire to know.

There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses.

Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.

It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, I only most respectfully return Him the ticket.

Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?

Supposing truth is a woman, what then?

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Am I my brother's keeper?

My tongue swore, but my mind is unsworn.

We know the good and recognise it, but we do not work it out, some from idleness, and some from preferring some other pleasure to the good.

I walk on air and contemplate the sun.

Zeus? What Zeus? There is no Zeus.

I suffered those deeds more than I performed them.

Not to be born is best of all; and next best, by far, is to go back quickly where you came from.

What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes and never is?

The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.

I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, that unless I believed, I should not understand.

Even the fool is convinced that something than which nothing greater can be conceived exists at least in his understanding, since when he hears of this he understands it.

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

One thing, and only one thing, is necessary for Christian life, righteousness, and freedom. That one thing is the most holy Word of God.

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!

Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

The nature of an individual substance is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to comprehend and to allow the deduction of all the predicates of the subject to which the notion is attributed.

Every substance is like a complete world and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way.

Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.

An idea can be like nothing but an idea.

The True is the whole.

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual is higher than the universal.

He who loved himself became great by himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge.

There is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.

Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

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 to walk humbly with thy God?

Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?

There was Chaos and Night and black Erebus at first, and wide Tartarus, and no earth or air or sky; and in the boundless bosom of Erebus black-winged Night brought forth a wind-egg.

What do you want to call the place? Something grand, out of the clouds, plenty of puff to it. Cloudcuckooland?

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

My soul doth magnify the Lord. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.

All instruction is either about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs.

Whoever thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought.

What part of life is not sorrowful and unpleasant, dull, insipid and troublesome, unless you add pleasure to it, that is to say, a seasoning of folly?

Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part?

Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.

For what justice is this, that a rich goldsmith or an usurer should have a pleasant and wealthy living, and in the meantime a poor labourer, a carter, a smith, without whom no commonwealth could continue, should get so hard and poor a living?

Heresy is a spiritual matter which no iron can strike, no fire burn, no water drown.

The soul is not under the authority of Caesar; he can neither teach nor guide it, neither kill it nor give it life, neither bind it nor loose it.

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.

The orbit of a planet is an ellipse, with the sun at one of the two foci.

A line joining a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times.

The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

We have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not.

Cover that bosom, which I cannot endure to look on. Such things damage the soul and stir up sinful thoughts.

There is a great difference between hypocrisy and devotion.

By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.

Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their desire, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to want and to will.

The monad is nothing but a simple substance which enters into composites; simple, that is to say, without parts.

Monads have no windows through which anything could come in or go out.

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.

It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles.

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

The history of the world is nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?

The paradox is the passion of thought, and a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

Call me Ishmael.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the ordering of time.

You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on.

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself that makes all pious actions pious.

Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old; for no one is either too young or too old for the health of the soul.

Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Speech was instituted in order that we might either teach or be reminded. What then do we do when we speak, except teach or be taught?

If I am given a sign and I do not know the thing of which it is a sign, it teaches me nothing; if I know the thing, what does the sign teach me?

God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful. Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him. All that is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Him.

There is no compulsion in religion: true guidance has become distinct from error.

Roland is brave and Oliver is wise, and both are men of amazing courage.

Companion Roland, sound your horn of ivory. Charles will hear it and the army will turn back. Roland answers: God forbid that my kinsmen should be blamed for me, or that sweet France should fall into disgrace.

He began to wonder what it was that had left her, and where it had gone.

Everything that comes to be must have a cause, and the chain of causes cannot go on without end, so there must be a being whose existence is necessary.

All their life was spent not by laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. Their rule was this one clause: Do what you will.

I would rather have you learn nothing than learn such books under such masters, for their learning is but stupidity and their wisdom a sham, bastardising good and noble minds and spoiling the flower of youth.

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, / Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine, / The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde.

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

The square of the periodic time of any planet is to the square of the periodic time of another as the cube of its mean distance is to the cube of the other's.

I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far from the borders of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you reproach me, I shall endure.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, and with forced fingers rude shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (that last infirmity of noble mind) to scorn delights, and live laborious days.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

You are very fortunate, Father, to be able to say that, for otherwise I should have thought it a great sin.

The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.

Nobody, therefore, in fine, neither single persons nor churches, nay, nor even commonwealths, have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretence of religion.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; / All Discord, Harmony not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good: / And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever IS, is RIGHT.