Quotes to inspire and reflect

Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and God himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.

Almost all the moral good which is left among us is the apparent effect of physical evil.

Jove weighs affairs of earth in dubious scales, / And the good suffers while the bad prevails.

There is no such thing in man’s nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.

Even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.

Nothing is good for him for whom nothing is bad.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

Good and bad may not be dissevered; / There is, as there should be, a commingling.

It’s wiser being good than bad; / It’s safer being meek than fierce: / It’s fitter being sane than mad.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly; and it would seem that the same is true of the good.

Everyone places his good where he can and has as much of it as he can, in his own way.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

Men always love what is good or what they find good; it is in judging what is good that they go wrong.

It is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

The good things of life are not to he had singly, hut come to us with a mixture; like a schoolboy’s holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.

We must take the good with the bad; / For the good when it’s good, is so very good / That the bad when it’s bad can’t be bad!

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people.

We look for good on earth and cannot recognize it / when met.

Whatever befalls in accordance with nature should be accounted good.

Almost, I am tempted to say, I will believe in God, yes, in spite of the church and the ministers.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

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.

If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.

Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God’s dust is greater than your idol.

We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the Universe.

Who created all this? Yasha would ask himself. Was it the sun? If so, then perhaps the sun was God. Yasha had read in some holy book that Abraham had worshiped the sun before accepting the existence of Jehovah.

God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

We have been born under a monarchy; to obey God is freedom.

Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.

But who can speak to God, or rather who can’t? The question is, who can get an answer?

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

It is God that accomplishes all term to hopes, / God, who overtakes the flying eagle, outpasses the dolphin / in the sea; who bends under his strength the man with thoughts too high.

God, he whom everyone knows, by name.

If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest.

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.

The heart is a mystery—not a puzzle that can’t be solved, but a mystery in the religious sense: unfathomable, beyond manipulation, showing traces of the finger of God.

’Tis heaven alone that is given away, / 'Tis only God may be had for the asking.

To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.

If any man obeys the gods, they listen to him also.

The First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

God lies ahead. I convince myself and constantly repeat to myself that: He depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.

I have never wished there was a God to call on—

The way of God is complex, he is hard / for us to predict. He moves the pieces and they come / somehow into a kind of order.

If god is truly god, he is perfect, / lacking nothing.