Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
God
-
“... God is enough! All religion is enfolded for me now in these three words.”
-
“My soul was always so full of aspirations, that a God was a necessity to me. I was like a bird with an instinct of migration upon me, and a country to migrate to was as essential as it is to the bird”
-
“It's not surprising the faithful remain adoring; they never see him.”
-
“Saying 'God within me' brought me an inrush of quietness and sweetness, a feeling inside me of dignity and wholeness which was not me at all, but something greater than I was, against which the horrors were powerless.”
-
“Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort but I do not think they will find God.”
-
“Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there.”
-
“Father-Mother is the name for Deity ...”
-
“God is universal; confined to no spot, defined by no dogma, appropriated by no sect.”
-
“Behind God's eyes / There might / Be other lights.”
-
“I read the book of Job last night — I don't think God comes well out of it ... ”
-
“I'll bet when you get down on them rusty knees and get to worrying God, He just goes in His privy-house and slams the door. That's what He thinks about you and your prayers.”
-
“If I were Her what would really piss me off the worst is that they cannot even get My gender right for Christsakes. ”
-
“Most of the books call Her a He, but I am able to ascertain what is meant, despite that semantic error..”
-
“... I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the color and fragrance of a flower — the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.”
-
“I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.”
-
“I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that he was indifferent.”
-
“God is / Too big / To fit / Inside / One / Religion.”
-
“Precisely because of the greatness of God, we don't have to be great at all. Just in awe.”
-
“It is said that we only get to know God in those stark moments when we are driven to depend on him.”
-
“The best thing about being God would be making the heads.”
-
“Now as for God's particular interest in us or agenda for us in general, whatever issue you look at, sex or social morality, all the evidence points in one direction. He is just not that into us.”
-
“'God is. God is,' he said. I do not know how his meaning was conveyed to me, perhaps by sympathy; but it suddenly flashed into my mind that when he said, 'God is,' he expressed the completest realization of God which is possible to the spirit; and when he said, 'God is,' he meant me to understand that there was no being, nothing that is, except God.”
-
“I believe anyone who momentarily perceives the Absolute will never again need any other circumstance for happiness.”
-
“I may not believe in God. But I do believe in the people who believe in God.”
-
“Our only hope rests on the off-chance that God does exist.”
-
“I don't believe in God, but I do believe in His saints ... ”
-
“My son called to me that God was inside his red fire engine. He wanted to show me. I did move as fast as I could, spilling like water through the kitchen door into a summer day, but God had left by the time I got there. My son smiled, told me I'd missed him by seconds.”
-
“Before I was ten I became critical of the anthropomorphic God as interpreted in the churches. I did not warm to One thus revealed as the semblance of a bullying and mean old man who must have all his own way, be praised all the time and for attributes which were deplorable in us.”
-
“God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.”
-
“The soul can split the sky in two, / And let the face of God shine through.”
-
“God, I can push the grass apart / And lay my finger on Thy heart!”
-
“Man has never been the same since God died.”
-
“Once you understand that God is the center of the universe, it's all very simple. Not a day goes by that I don't say, 'Thank you. I'm truly blessed.'”
-
“The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.”
-
“The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.”
-
“... she'd a pow'rful Belief in God, whom she believ'd had a more sympathetick Ear to Black Voices than to White ones, owing to the greater Suff'rings of their Possessors.”
-
“If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.”
-
“Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.'”
-
“In all ages and cultures there is a yearning and a pull, against mortal gravity, to a more authentic reality in which we drown, with which we merge, in which we lose the discrete boundaries of self. That reality is felt to be a power, a stream, pure nothingness, pure Being. It is God, it is consciousness, it is the human self perfected.”
-
“God has always been to me not so much like a father as like a dear and tender mother. ”
-
“... my belief is that we did not come from God so much as that we are going towards God.”
-
“For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.”
-
“Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.”
-
“The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when it has attained repose; when the worshipper not only sees God every where, but sees nothing which is not full of God.”
-
“What care I if good God be / If he be not good to me ...”
-
“Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.”
-
“It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.”
-
“If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.”
-
“It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.”
-
“... God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it.”
-
“We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. ”
-
“We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.”
-
“The essential thing to know about God is that God is the Good. All the rest is secondary. ”
-
“If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.”
-
“The world is God's language to us ...”
-
“God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness. He is not in the general. He is in the particular. When we understand the particular, then we will know all.”
-
“When we choose a god we choose one as much like ourselves as possible, or even more so!”
-
“All desire the gifts of God, but they do not desire God.”
-
“Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God. ... The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.”
-
“Ain't no way to read the bible and not think God white, she say. Then she sigh. When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest.”
-
“God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. ... Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It.”
-
“Listen, God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don't But more than anything else, God love admiration. ... I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. ... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. ... It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.”
-
“She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”
-
“... I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the beginning recognize its originator and upholder as being of the female sex.”
-
“One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men.”
-
“To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.”
-
“Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.”
-
“I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.”
-
“God is not indifferent to your need. / You have a thousand prayers / but God has one.”
-
“... God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.”
-
“... God's unique capacity is too surprising to surprise.”
-
“The Infinite a sudden Guest / Has been assumed to be — / But how can that stupendous come / Which never went away?”
-
“Of Course — I prayed — / And did God Care?”
-
“...when I speak to the fox, / the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, / know that really I am speaking to you whenever I say, / as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in.”
-
“We must do everything we are obliged to do; give without reckoning, practice virtue whenever opportunity offers, constantly overcome ourselves, prove our love by all the little acts of tenderness and consideration we can muster. In a word, we must produce all the good works that lie within our strength — out of love for God.”
-
“'Indeed, indeed, the times are troubled, Sir Edmund,' he said, 'but we must remember that we are all in God's hands.' 'I know we are,' said Mrs. Brandon earnestly, laying her hand on the Vicar's sleeve, 'and that is just what is so perfectly dreadful.'”
-
“God has no other hands than ours.”
-
“... God is action — let us be like God.”
-
“Ah! My noble lineage! Have I come from God? Perhaps I have, for there is a part of me that seems to remember stars I cannot reach.”
-
“We had the wrath of God four times in sermons this last summer, but God cannot be angry all the time, — nobody could, especially in summer ...”
-
“... you can never prove God; you can only find Him!”
-
“Nearer, my God, to Thee, / Nearer to Thee.”
-
“'God' is always the equivalent of 'I do not know.'”
-
“We must free ourselves to be filled by God. Even God cannot fill what is full.”
-
“God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence.”
-
“God has not called me to be successful; he has called me to be faithful.”
-
“Any work of love brings a person face to face with God.”
-
“From the moment a soul has the grace to know God, she must seek.”
-
“In vocal prayer we speak to God; in mental prayer he speaks to us. It is then that God pours Himself into us.”
-
“Death, in the final analysis, is only the easiest and quickest means to go back to God. If only we could make people understand that we come from God and that we have to go back to Him!”
-
“Thank God we don't serve God with our feelings, otherwise I don't know where I would be. — Pray for me.”
-
“... even God could do nothing for someone already full. You have to be completely empty to let Him in to do what He will.”
-
“People are hungry for God. What [a] terrible meeting [it] would be with our neighbour if we give them only ourselves.”
-
“Heaven is the presence of God.”
-
“... if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority? That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.”
-
“When we reckon without Providence, we must frequently reckon twice.”
-
“... I was experiencing that having God one had all things.”
-
“Does God sing?”
-
“It isn't that I believe God is dead, but God is so silent, has been for so long, and is so hidden, I take it as a sign I must watch in other places or simply tend my small fires until the end.”
-
“God, a man at Yale, adopted a monkey / In order to raise him up in his own image, / But only in some respects could the monk identify, / Could learn manners, but not the word of God.”
-
“When a man sits in the warm sunshine, do you ask him for proof of it? He feels — that is all. And we feel — that is all. We want no proof of our God. We feel, we feel!”
-
“God Is a Black Woman.”
-
“How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds.”
-
“We do not earn or deserve the love of God; we already have it.”
-
“They treated their God like a desk clerk with whom they lodged requests and complaints.”
-
“Men get together in pretentious councils to decide what God is, what God thinks, what God wants the rest of us to do for him, and the one thing he never fails to want is more money.”
-
“It seems to me that in our time faith in God is the same thing as faith in good and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.”
-
“It's a little-known linguistic curiosity that the name Jehovah or Jaweh is the same name as Eve; Havva, the counterpart name in Farsi, the language spoken by the Persians, means either Jaweh or Eve.”
-
“In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by monotheism.”
-
“... God is always more unlike what we say than like it.”
-
“... enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.”
-
“Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.”
-
“... science never threatens God — it opens up more possibilities.”
-
“The ways of Providence cannot be reasoned out by the finite mind ... I cannot fathom them, yet seeking to know them is the most satisfying thing in all the world.”
-
“I was passionate, / filled with longing, / I searched / far and wide. / But the day / that the Truthful One / found me, / I was at home.”
-
“... if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.”
-
“... you can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
-
“He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.”
-
“... I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke — the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.”
-
“... once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.”
-
“Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.”
-
“Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father — God as borderline personality.”
-
“... if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.”
-
“... a priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.”
-
“It seems odd / That whenever man chooses / To play God — / God loses.”
-
“Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, 'Well, isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.'”
-
“Someone loves us all.”
-
“Were we [women] to express our conceptions of God, it would never enter into the head of any one of us to describe him as a venerable old man.”
-
“I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen ...”
-
“Life teaches much, but to all thinking persons it brings ever closer the will of God — not because their faculties decline, but on the contrary, because they increase.”
-
“All things change, — creeds and philosophies and outward systems, — but God remains!”
-
“The liberating encounter with God/ess is always an encounter with our authentic selves resurrected from underneath the alienated self. It is not experienced against, but in and through relationships, healing our broken relations with our bodies, with other people, with nature.”
-
“It is impossible for human tongue to exaggerate the riches which a vision from God brings to the soul: it even bestows health and refreshment on the body.”
-
“Lord, how Thou dost afflict Thy lovers!”
-
“But God will provide.”
-
“Let nothing disturb thee; / Let nothing dismay thee: / All things pass; / God never changes. / Patience attains / All that it strives for. / He who has God / Finds he lacks nothing: / God alone suffices.”
-
“O my Lord, if I worship Thee from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee from hope of Paradise, exclude me thence, but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake then withhold not from me Thine Eternal Beauty.”
-
“Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.”
-
“In some ways, all our experiences of God are beyond belief, because all conceptual beliefs pale when compared to the experiential reality.”
-
“God is a God of Lovingkindness.”
-
“... we must be as satisfied to be powerless, idle and still before God, and dried up and barren when He permits it, as to be full of life, enjoying His presence with ease and devotion. The whole matter of our union with God consists in being content either way.”
-
“... whoever is so stupid as to imagine God to be either masculine or feminine openly shows that he is as bad a philosopher as a theologian.”
-
“... in God alone is love without tears, and of eternal duration.”
-
“But who walks with Him? — dares to take His arm, / To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear, / Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer, / Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?”
-
“The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything.”
-
“Every friendship with God and every love between Him and a soul is the only one of its kind.”
-
“I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.”
-
“I have met a great many people on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.”
-
“The well of Providence is deep. It is the buckets we bring to it that are small.”
-
“... because I believe in a God with a sense of humor (and not only because he created ducks), I believe he is lovingly amused at my impertinence — like parents with very small bumptious children — not angry about it.”
-
“I'd begun to think you were a bit like God — / You make things happen but you don't exist.”
-
“God is not finished creating … and therefore life is not behind us, it is ahead of us.”
-
“A dynamic universe provokes the idea and the understanding of a dynamic God. This is not a stay-at-home God.”
-
“This is a God who is deeply immersed in a love affair with the beloved, the creation which flows out of his divine heart ... God is eternally and dynamically in love.”
-
“god is not / the voice in the whirlwind / god is the whirlwind / at the last / judgment we will all be trees.”
-
“... metaphors for God drawn from human experience can easily be literalized. While we are immediately aware that the personal God is not really a rock or a mother eagle, it is easy enough to imagine that God is really a king or a father.”
-
“No matter how entrenched in the imagination of the average Christian the image of a male God might be, theological tradition has never assigned sex to God.”
-
“... the gender of God, God's presumed masculinity, has functioned as the ultimate religious legitimization of the unjust social structures which victimize women.”
-
“God: If she turns out to be Eleanor Roosevelt, some of these turkeys are in big trouble.”
-
“There is a god, and she likes me.”
-
“I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?'”
-
“Many now veer away from the time-honored use of the term Father as applied to the Christian God ... This difficulty rests mainly, I believe, on failure to distinguish between a symbol and a definition.”
-
“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, / 'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.' / And he replied, 'Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God. / That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.'”
-
“Just as a pool of water cannot reflect the sky overhead when it is restless and disturbed, so we can never get a perfect vision of the Divine, and show it to others when we are disturbed with human thoughts and personal problems. It is only when we are quite still and receptive that God can think His thoughts into us and use us for His purposes.”
-
“Science conducts us, step by step, through the whole range of creation, until we arrive, at length, at God.”
-
“... in all the unspectacular immediacy of daily living — both in the natural world and in daily work — God is close at hand.”
-
“I could be whatever I wanted to be if I trusted that music, that song, that vibration of God that was inside of me.”
-
“If God is your partner make your plans large.”
-
“The laws of God work in the same way as the laws of Science. You cannot break them — you can only break yourself against them.”
-
“I love God. And when you get to know Him, you find He's a Livin' Doll.”
-
“Although we have not assigned God a sexual orientation, a height, or eye color, we have thought nothing of assigning a gender and a religion (God always belongs to the same one we do).”
-
“God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one another.”
-
“Anyone who ... thinks that, through her own words and actions, she initiates and controls the connections between herself and God — mustn't have much experience of God's boundless affection for even the grudgingest of creatures.”
-
“This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell.”
-
“If you knew what a sensation of the nearness of a higher power one instinctively feels when one is permitted to contribute to the good of mankind, as I have done, and still do! Believe me, it is a great gift of God's mercy!”
-
“Love is the nature of God in action.”
-
“Not even one sincere desire to find God ever goes unrewarded.”
-
“I had always been told the bible was a book about love, but I couldn't find enough love in it to fill a salt shaker. God is not love in the bible; God is vengeance. There is no other book between whose covers life is so cheap.”
-
“This — this thing of the spirit you call God — and I thoroughly understand your differentiation between the exterior entity some people worship and the interior presence — cannot occupy the human soul at the same time that it is occupied by hatred. A simple matter of what might be called spiritual physics.”
-
“God is she, he and neither.”
-
“The gods come to us in the forms we recognize.”
-
“The majority of human beings do not turn to God because they have not enough happiness but because happiness is not enough.”
-
“... in things greate and extraordinary some perhaps will take notice of God's working, who either forgett or believe not that he takes as well a care and account of their smallest concernments ...”
-
“Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb — the most active and dynamic of all?”
-
“It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.”
-
“... if God is male, then the male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.”
-
“How much did I hear of religion as a child? Very little, and yet my heart leaped when I heard the name of God. I do believe every soul has a tendency toward God.”
-
“... how can God direct our steps if we're not taking any?”
-
“Though language about God cannot really tell us about the nature of God, because of the limitations of language and the nature of God, it can tell us a great deal about those who create and use the God-language.”
-
“The more we thank God for the blessings we receive, the more we open the way for further blessings.”
-
“God's love is just like the sun, constant and shining for us all. And just as the earth rotates around the sun, it is the natural order for us to move away for a season, and then to return closer, but always within the appropriate time.”
-
“... each of us has been given the ability to reach God with our prayers. ... Whatever form it takes, each prayer is an invitation for God to bring his power into another life. God wants to help us, but he waits for us to seek his help.”
-
“God's been going deaf. ... Here God used to raineth bread from clouds, smite the Phillipines, sling fire down on red-light districts where people got stabbed. He even appeared in person every once in a while. God used to pay attention, is what I'm saying.”
-
“Destiny doesn't exist. It's God we need, and fast.”
-
“... to understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.”
-
“They serve God well / Who serve His creatures.”
-
“The greatest atrocities have always been committed in the name of and for the glory of god, and they go on to this day.”
-
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
-
“Why should we not pray to our mother who are in heaven, as well as to our father?”
-
“Sophia wished that Florence would not talk about the Almighty as if his real name was Godfrey, and God was just Florence's nickname for him.”
-
“I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.”
-
“When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted — anything! — the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women — or anyone-- as chattel or inferior beings.”
-
“Why believe we'll realize God years from now, after many years of spiritual practice, after many more lifetimes of practice? She's right here, right now! We don't have to wait another second.”
-
“Whether consciously or not, sexist God language undermines the human equality of women made in the divine image and likeness.”
-
“... the way in which a faith community shapes language about God implicity represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty. ... While officially it is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, yet the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman, or at least more fittingly addressed as male than as female.”
-
“New gods arise when they are needed.”
-
“Call it God, the Goddess, a Higher Power, Earth, the Life Force, quantum physics, the Tao, we long for a personal connection with some force greater than ourselves.”
-
“God is spreading grace around in the world like a five-year-old spreads peanut butter: thickly, sloppily, eagerly.”
-
“When souls before Thee reverently bow, / Oh, carest Thou what name the lips breathe low / Jove, or Osiris, or the God Unknown ... ?”
-
“My priorities have always been God first, family second, career third. I have found that when I put my life in this order, everything seems to work out. ... Making God and family top priorities does not demean the role work plays in our lives. After all, where do we spend more of our waking hours than at work?”
-
“[On God:] She makes everything possible.”
-
“Unlike many of his contemporaries among the deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine Husband or Lover of any. He can scarcely be characterized in any but masculine epithets: king, lord, master, judge, and father. Indeed, the absence of feminine symbolism for God marks Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in striking contrast to the world's other religious traditions, whether in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and Rome, or in Africa, India, and North America, which abound in female symbolism. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians today are quick to point out that God is not to be considered in sexual terms at all. Yet the actual language they use in daily worship and prayer conveys a different message: who, growing up with Jewish or Christian tradition, has escaped the distinct impression that God is masculine? And while Catholics revere Mary as the mother of Jesus, they never identify her as divine in her own right: if she is 'mother of God,' she is not 'God the Mother' on an equal footing with God the Father!”
-
“All things bright and beautiful, / All creatures great and small, / All things wise and wonderful, / The Lord God made them all.”
-
“Be fervent in God, and let nothing grieve you, whatever you encounter.”
-
“... even if you do the best you can in all things, your human nature must often fall short; so entrust yourself to God's goodness, for his goodness is greater than your failures.”
-
“... those who've never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.”
-
“Often God shuts a door in our face, and then subsequently opens the door through which we need to go.”
-
“I, the fiery life of divine wisdom, I ignite the beauty of the plains, I sparkle the water, I burn in the sun, and the moon, and the stars.”
-
“The soul is kissed by God in its innermost regions.”
-
“It is easier to gaze into the sun, than into the face of the mystery of God. Such is its beauty and its radiance.”
-
“Divinity is in its omniscience and omnipotence like a wheel, a circle, a whole, that can neither be understood, nor divided, nor begun nor ended.”
-
“For god is nothing other than the eternally creative source of our relational power, our common strength, a god whose movement is to empower, bringing us into our own together, a god whose name in history is love ...”
-
“... the very minute we think we 'have' God, God will surprise us. As we search in fire and earthquakes, God will be in the still small voice. As we listen in silent meditation, God will be shouting protests in the street. God is warning us that we had best not try to find our security in any well-defined concept or category of what is Godly — for the minute we believe we are into God, God is off again and calling us forth into some unknown place.”
-
“God reveals herself through our relationships not only to other people but also to other creatures and nature.”
-
“My parents professed to believe in God, but I rarely heard his name mentioned unattached to 'damn' or 'sakes' or 'willing.'”
-
“God serves the choosy. They know what to want ...”
-
“God is a name we give to love.”
-
“If all are created in the divine image, then our images of God must be fluid and multifarious.”
-
“She had always thought God was someone who was always amused, amused at her, but not only at her. God stood at the head of a table, not a wooden table, but something temporary, set up only for the occasion. Heaven was everyone delighted to see everyone, everyone dressed up. And God was the most delighted.”
-
“... if there has to be a god can she be a committee of women dedicated to wiping out earthly oppression ...”
-
“The veil between us and the divine is more permeable than we imagine.”
-
“If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe from falling, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown me. But this was shown: that whether in falling or in rising we are always kept in the same precious love.”
-
“As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother ...”
-
“God is our clothing, that wraps, clasps and encloses us so as to never leave us.”
-
“In God's sight we do not fall: in our own we do not stand.”
-
“Until I am essentially united with God, I can never have full rest or real happiness.”
-
“Fire had an almost magical quality that suggested anything was possible. Early on, man even believed that fire was a god that had to be fed with animal sacrifices in order to burn brightly. Today we have evolved a long way from this ridiculous notion of a 'fire god' and now rightfully understand God to be a bearded being who lives amongst the clouds and hates Jews and homosexuals.”
-
“i found god in myself / & i loved her / i loved her fiercely.”
-
“... we have these extraordinary minds and souls ... because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.”
-
“I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.”
-
“Spirituality is an inner fire, a mystical sustenance that feeds our souls. The mystical journey drives us into ourselves, to a sacred flame at our center. The purpose of the religious experience is to develop the eyes by which we see this inner flame, and our capacity to live its mystery. In its presence, we are warmed and ignited. When too far from the blaze, we are cold and spiritually lifeless. We are less than human without that heat. Our connection to God is life itself.”
-
“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”
-
“There are so many hungry people that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
-
“God is a sure paymaster. He may not pay at the end of every week, or month, or year, but I charge you remember that He pays in the end.”
-
“We enter our sacred garden through a variety of gates. ... there are many, many gates to the sacred and they are as wide as we need them to be.”
-
“This whole world is full of God!”
-
“God is life itself to us — the air, the bread, and the blood of the soul. No one can live without, at every moment, drawing upon Him, however unconscious they may be that they are.”
-
“I saw God last night. Really? What's he like? Well, he's a woman and she's black!”
-
“Create no images of God. / Accept the images / that God has provided. / They are everywhere, / in everything. / ... The universe / is God's self-portrait.”
-
“I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the shining heights of Heaven, the wholesome sea-breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below. Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names, and propitiated with all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me.”
-
“When I was a young child I asked my mother what God was doing before he created the world. I was told he was making switches for people who asked such questions. Thanks for the enlightenment, Mom. But as far as I know, no Christian theologian has answered that question any better.”
-
“I am food on the prisoner's plate ... / the patient gardener / of the dry and weedy garden ... / the stone step, / the latch, and the working hinge.”
-
“I once heard someone say that my belief in Jesus makes them suspect that I intellectually suck my thumb at night. But I cannot pretend, as much as sometimes I would like to, that I have not throughout my life experienced the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God.”
-
“god walked into church / and was thrown out because he / seemed kind of crazy.”
-
“In the beginning, people prayed to the Creatress of Life, the Mistress of Heaven. At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?”
-
“The soul is a sea that we swim in. It has no shore on this side, and only far away, on the other side is there a shore, and that shore is God.”