Quotes to inspire and reflect

Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

The only money of God is God. He pays never with any thing less, or any thing else.

Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.

God is our name for the last generalization to which we can arrive.

God is indeed a jealous God— / He cannot bear to see / That we had rather not with Him / But with each other play.

If every gnat that flies were an archangel, all that could but tell me that there is a God; and the poorest worm that creeps tells me that.

God is for men and religion for women.

Though God’s attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice.

Man appoints, and God disappoints.

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.

Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army.

Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.

The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

Theist and Atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.

God’s merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion.

God is the perfect poet, / Who in his person acts his own creations.

God without the devil is dead, being alone.

We should find God in what we do know, not in what we don’t; not in outstanding problems, but in those we have already solved.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

The power that holds the sky’s majesty wins our worship.

We, peopling the void air, / Make Gods to whom to impute / The ills we ought to bear; / With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.

The shortest way to arrive at glory would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory.

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright, / But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

To the ashes of the dead glory comes too late.

Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.

There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment,

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.

When I give I give myself.

I cannot even pretend to feel as much interest in boys as in girls.

Surely great loving-kindness yet may go / With a little gift: all’s dear that comes from friends.

Man discovers his own wealth / when God comes to ask gifts of him.

Leave out my name from the gift / if it be a burden, / but keep my song.

An enemy’s gift is ruinous and no gift.

The spirit in which a thing is given determines that in which the debt is acknowledged; it’s the intention, not the face-value of the gift, that’s weighed.

You pay a great deal too dear for what’s given freely.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

The heart and hand of those who always mete out become callous from always meting out.

Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.

He gives only the worthless gold / Who gives from a sense of duty.

What with your friend you nobly share, / At least you rescue from your heir.

Let him that desires to see others happy, make haste to give while his gift can be enjoyed, and remember that every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction.

That is the bitterness of a gift, that it deprives us of our liberty.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one.

The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

Ghost, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.