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Who said: “I have no satisfaction in formulas unless I feel their arithmetical magnitude.”
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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index G > Category: God

God Quotes (776 quotes)


… what is physical is subject to the laws of mathematics, and what is spiritual to the laws of God, and the laws of mathematics are but the expression of the thoughts of God.
In 'The Uses of Mathesis', Bibliotheca Sacra, 32, 523.
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...for the animals, which we resemble and which would be our equals if we did not have reason, do not reflect upon the actions or the passions of their external or internal senses, and do not know what is color, odor or sound, or if there is any differences between these objects, to which they are moved rather than moving themselves there. This comes about by the force of the impression that the different objects make on their organs and on their senses, for they cannot discern if it is more appropriate to go and drink or eat or do something else, and they do not eat or drink or do anything else except when the presence of objects or the animal imagination [l'imagination brutalle], necessitates them and transports them to their objects, without their knowing what they do, whether good or bad; which would happen to us just as to them if we were destitute of reason, for they have no enlightenment except what they must have to take their nourishment and to serve us for the uses to which God has destined them.
[Arguing the uniqueness of man by regarding animals to be merely automatons.].
Les Préludes de l'Harmonie Universelle (1634), 135-139. In Charles Coulston Gillespie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1974), Vol. 9, 318.
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...We must be on our guard against giving interpretations that are hazardous or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.
Genesis in the Literal Sense
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“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…” Whatever our speculations may be in regard to a “beginning,” and when it was, it is written in the rocks that, like the animals and plants upon its surface, the earth itself grew.
In Nature's Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science (1899), Vol. 1, 1.
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“It's absolutely clear that the function of the world is to declare the glory of God.” I thought, what does that sentence mean?!
Quoting and reacting to a letter he saw in a newspaper about Stephen Hawking’s comments on the nonexistence of God. From 'Interview: Of Mind and Matter: David Attenborough Meets Richard Dawkins', The Guardian (11 Sep 2010).
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“They were apes only yesterday. Give them time.”
“Once an ape—always an ape.”…
“No, it will be different. … Come back here in an age or so and you shall see. …”
[The gods, discussing the Earth, in the movie version of Wells’ The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936).]
The Man Who Could Work Miracles: a film by H.G. Wells based on the short story (1936), 105-106. Quoted in Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain (1979, 1986), 3.
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[1665-04-30] ...Great fear of the sicknesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.
Diary of Samuel Pepys (30 Apr 1665)
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[1665-06-10] ...In the evening home to supper, and there to my great trouble hear that the plague is come into the City (though it hath these three or four weeks since its beginning been wholly out of the City); but where it begin but in my good friend and neighbour's, Dr Burnett in Fanchurch Street - which in both points troubles me mightily. To the office to finish my letters, and then home to bed, being troubled at the sickness ... and particularly how to put my things and estate in order, in case it should please God to call me away.
Diary of Samuel Pepys (10 Jun 1665)
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[1665-06-17] It stroke me very deep this afternoon, going with a hackney-coach from my Lord Treasurer's down Holborne - the coachman I found to drive easily and easily; at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand; and told me that he was suddenly stroke very sick and almost blind. So I light and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself, lest he should have been stroke with the plague - being at that end of the town that I took him up. But God have mercy upon us all.
Diary of Samuel Pepys (17 Jun 1665)
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[1665-08-16] ...Hence to the Exchange, which I have not been a great while. But Lord, how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people, and very few upon the Change - jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the plague - and about us, two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up. ... It was dark before I could get home; and so land at church-yard stairs, where to my great trouble I met a dead Corps, of the plague, in the narrow ally, just bringing down a little pair of stairs - but I thank God I was not much disturbed at it. However, I shall beware of being late abroad again.
Diary of Samuel Pepys (16 Aug 1665)
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[1665-10-16] But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that. And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physitian, and but one apothecary left, all being dead - but that there are great hopes of a great decrease this week. God send it.
Diary of Samuel Pepys (16 Oct 1665)
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[1665-12-31] Thus ends this year ... It is true we have gone through great melancholy because of the great plague, and I put to great charges by it, by keeping my family long at Woolwich, and myself and another part of my family, my clerks, at my charge at Greenwich ... But now the plague is abated almost to nothing ... But many of such as I know very well, dead. Yet to our great joy, the town fills apace, and shops begin to open again. Pray God continue the plague's decrease - for that keeps the Court away from the place of business, and so all goes to wrack as to public matters, they at this distance not thinking of it.
Diary of Samuel Pepys (31 Dec 1665)
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[After science lost] its mystical inspiration … man’s destiny was no longer determined from “above” by a super-human wisdom and will, but from “below” by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. … A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.
In 'Epilogue', The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), 539.
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[Antarctica has 90 percent of the world’s ice, and God help us if it melts,] whales will be swimming in the streets of New York.
From address (20 Sep 1989) to the National Press Club, as quoted in Phil McCombs, The Washington Post (21 Sep 1989).
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[Florence Nightingale] was a great administrator, and to reach excellence here is impossible without being an ardent student of statistics. Florence Nightingale has been rightly termed the “Passionate Statistician.” Her statistics were more than a study, they were indeed her religion. For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed—and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief—that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator—to say nothing of the politician—too often failed for want of this knowledge. Nay, she went further: she held that the universe—including human communities—was evolving in accordance with a divine plan; that it was man's business to endeavour to understand this plan and guide his actions in sympathy with it. But to understand God's thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose. Thus the study of statistics was for her a religious duty.
In Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (1924), Vol. 2, 414-5.
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[I] grew up as a disciple of science. I know its fascination. I have felt the godlike power man derives from his machines.
Quoted in 'Antiseptic Christianity', book review of Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life in Time magazine, (6 Sep 1948).
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[In the beginning, before creation] There was neither Aught nor Naught, no air nor sky beyond. …
[There was only]
A self-supporting mass beneath, and energy above.
Who knows, who ever told, from whence this vast creation rose?
No gods had yet been born—who then can e’er the truth disclose?
In Rigveda. In John Robson, Hinduism and Its Relations to Christianity (1893), 17.
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[Isaac Newton] regarded the Universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty—just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.
In 'Newton, the Man' (1946). In Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), Essays in Biography, 2nd edition (1951), 314.
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[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. … On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller’s works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the Heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic written by the finger of God upon the strata of the Earth!
In Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1889), 82-83.
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[Reply to a lady enquiring: “Have we lost faith?”] Certainly not, but we have only transferred it from God to the General Medical Council.
Invited to contribute to a series of article in a Manchester paper in reply to an enquiry [Have we lost faith?] the question, Shaws’s reply was the single sentence. In The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw (1930), Vol.22, 1.
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[Science] is the literature of God written on the stars—the trees—the rocks—and more important because [of] its marked utilitarian character.
Quoted in Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (1978), 57.
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[The sun] … which alone we should judge to be worthy of the most high God, if He should be pleased with a material domicile, and choose a place in which to dwell with the blessed angels.
As translated in Edwin Arthur Burtt, 'Kepler’s Early Acceptance of the New World-Scheme', The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and and Critical Essay (1925), 48. From the Latin [as best as Webmaster can tell]: “[solem] … unum dignum omnes aestimaremus, in quo Deus Opt. Max., si corporeo domicilio delectaretur et capi loco posset, cum beatis angelis inhabitaret,” in Christian Frisch (ed.), Opera Omnia, Vol. 8, Part 1, 267.
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[There was] in some of the intellectual leaders a great aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a piece of clock-work, but this was was itself initially a religious aspiration. It was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself—something not quite worthy of God—unless the whole system of the universe could be shown to be interlocking, so that it carried the pattern of reasonableness and orderliness. Kepler, inaugurating the scientist’s quest for a mechanistic universe in the seventeenth century, is significant here—his mysticism, his music of the spheres, his rational deity demand a system which has the beauty of a piece of mathematics.
In The Origins of Modern Science (1950), 105.
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[W]hen Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that he had learned the language in which God recreated the universe. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most devine and sacred gift.
From White House Announcement of the Completion of the First Survey of the Entire Human Genome Project, broadcast on the day of the publication of the first draft of the human genome. Quoted in transcript on the National Archives, Clinton White House web site, 'Text of Remarks on the Completion of the First Survey of the Entire Human Genome Project' (26 Jun 2000).
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[Watching natural history programs] brings a solace you can’t describe in words. It’s because we’re part of it fundamentally…. In moments of great grief, that’s where you look and immerse yourself. You realise you are not immortal, you are not a god, you are part of the natural world and you come to accept that.
Reflecting on the letters he received from newly bereaved people. While his series are running on TV, in dozens of letters daily (comprising the majority of the correspondence), they tell him that the only things they can face in their darkest moments are his natural-history programmes. From interview with Joe Shute, 'David Attenborough at 90: ‘I think about my mortality every day’', The Telegraph (29 Oct 2016).
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[We need not think] that there is any Contradiction, when Philosophy teaches that to be done by Nature; which Religion, and the Sacred Scriptures, teach us to be done by God: no more, than to say, That the balance of a Watch is moved by the next Wheel, is to deny that Wheel, and the rest, to be moved by the Spring; and that both the Spring, and all the other Parts, are caused to move together by the Maker of them. So God may be truly the Cause of This Effect, although a Thousand other Causes should be supposed to intervene: For all Nature is as one Great Engine, made by, and held in His Hand.
'An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants', in The Anatomy of Plants With an Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants and Several Other Lectures Read Before the Royal Society (1682),80.
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[When his physician father died of a heart attack:] It was then and there that I gave myself to medicine the way a monk gives himself to God. Not to have done so would have seemed an act of filial impiety. Since I could not find him in the flesh, I would find him in the work he did.
In Down From Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age (1992), 136.
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The Redwoods

Here, sown by the Creator's hand,
In serried ranks, the Redwoods stand;
No other clime is honored so,
No other lands their glory know.

The greatest of Earth's living forms,
Tall conquerors that laugh at storms;
Their challenge still unanswered rings,
Through fifty centuries of kings.

The nations that with them were young,
Rich empires, with their forts far-flung,
Lie buried now—their splendor gone;
But these proud monarchs still live on.

So shall they live, when ends our day,
When our crude citadels decay;
For brief the years allotted man,
But infinite perennials' span.

This is their temple, vaulted high,
And here we pause with reverent eye,
With silent tongue and awe-struck soul;
For here we sense life's proper goal;

To be like these, straight, true and fine,
To make our world, like theirs, a shrine;
Sink down, oh traveler, on your knees,
God stands before you in these trees.
In The Record: Volumes 60-61 (1938), 39.
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[Almost certainly not by Einstein.] The more I study science, the more I believe in God.
No cited primary source has been found, so it is almost certainly falsely linked with Einstein. Also, it is not compatible with Einstein’s documented statements on his religious views. See, for example, the quote beginning “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions….” The subject quote is included here so readers may find this disclaimer.
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Ath. There still remain three studies suitable for freemen. Calculation in arithmetic is one of them; the measurement of length, surface, and depth is the second; and the third has to do with the revolutions of the stars in reference to one another … there is in them something that is necessary and cannot be set aside, … if I am not mistaken, [something of] divine necessity; for as to the human necessities of which men often speak when they talk in this manner, nothing can be more ridiculous than such an application of the words.
Cle. And what necessities of knowledge are there, Stranger, which are divine and not human?
Ath. I conceive them to be those of which he who has no use nor any knowledge at all cannot be a god, or demi-god, or hero to mankind, or able to take any serious thought or charge of them.
Plato
In Republic, Bk. 7, in Jowett, Dialogues of Plato (1897, 2010), Vol. 4, 331.
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Bernard: Oh, you’re going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I’ll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don’t confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars—big bangs, black holes—who [cares]? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?
Chloe: Are you against penicillin, Bernard?
Bernard: Don’t feed the animals.
In the play, Acadia (1993), Act 2, Scene 5, 61.
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Das Leben der Gotter ist Mathematik.
Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.
Attributed.
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Deus ex machina.
A God from the machine.
From the original in Greek.
Philopseudes, 29; De Mercede Conductis, I; Hermotimus, 86.
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Dieu, c'est le voile mystérieux sous lequel nous cachons notre ignorance de la cause première.
God is the mysterious veil under which we hide our ignorance of the cause.
In Recueil d'Œuvres de Léo Errera: Botanique Générale (1908), 193. Google translation by Webmaster.
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Gott würfelt nicht.
God does not play dice.
Commonly seen paraphrase. Einstein expressed this idea at different times. See variations on this website on the Albert Einstein Quotes page.
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Hominem ad deos nulla re propius accedunt quam salutem hominibus dando,
In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods, than in giving health to men.
Henry Thomas Riley, Dictionary of Latin Quotations, Proverbs, Maxims, and Mottos (1866), 152.
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Il n'y a qu'un demi-siècle, un orateur chrétien, se défiant des hommes de la science leur disait: 'Arrêtez-vous enfin, et ne creusez pas jusqu'aux enfers.' Aujourd'hui, Messieurs, rassurés sur l'inébranlable constance de notre foi, nous vous disons: creusez, creusez encore; plus vous descendrez, plus vous rapprocherez du grand mystère de l'impuissance de l'homme et de la vérité de la religion. Creusez donc, creusez toujours,mundum tradidit disputationibus eorum; et quand la science aura donné son dernier coup de marteau sur les fondements de la terre, vous pourrez à la lueur du feu qu'il fera jaillir, lire encore l'idée de Dieu et contempler l'empreinte de sa main.
Only a half-century ago, a Christian speaker, mistrustful of men of science told them: 'Stop finally, and do not dig to hell.' Today, gentlemen, reassured about the steadfastness of our unshakeable faith, we say: dig, dig again; the further down you, the closer you come to the great mystery of the impotence of man and truth of religion. So dig, always dig: and when science has stuck its final hammer blow on the bosom of the earth, you will be able to ignite a burst of light, read furthermore the mind of God and contemplate the imprint of His hand.
As Monseigneur Rendu, Bishop of Annecy, Savoy, presiding at the closing session of a meeting of the Geological Society of France at Chambéry, Savoy (27 Aug 1844). In Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France 1843 à 1844, Tome 1, Ser. 2, 857. (1844), li. Google trans., edited by Webmaster.
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Je le pansai, Dieu le guérit
I dressed him, and God healed him.
Quoted in Francis Randolph Packard, The Voyages Made Into Divers Places: The Journey to Turin in 1536', Life and Times of Ambroise Paré 1510-1590: With a New Translation (1921),160. Also translated as, “I treated him, God cured him.”
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L'homme est bien insensé. Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux à douzaines.
Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.
The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (1958), 834.
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Le premier regard de l’homme jeté sur l’univers n’y découvre que variété, diversité, multiplicité des phénomènes. Que ce regard soit illuminé par la science,—par la science qui rapproche l’homme de Dieu,—et la simplicité et l’unité brillent de toutes parts.
Man’s first glance at the universe discovers only variety, diversity, multiplicity of phenomena. Let that glance be illuminated by science—by the science which brings man closer to God,—and simplicity and unity shine on all sides.
Original French quoted in René Vallery-Radot, La Vie de Pasteur (1901), 209. Translation by Google translate, tweaked by Webmaster. The English version of the book, omits this passage, except for “Science, which brings man nearer to God.” In The Life of Pasteur (1902), Vol. 1, 194.
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Mon royaume est de la dimension de l’univers, et mon désir n’a pas de bornes. Je vais toujours, affranchissant l’esprit et pesant les mondes, sans haine, sans peur, sans pitié, sans amour, et sans Dieu. On m’appelle la Science.
My kingdom is of the dimension of the universe and my desire has no bounds. I am going about always to free the spirit and weigh the worlds, without hatred, without fear, without pity and without God. They call me Science.
French passage from La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874) in Œvres Complètes de Gustave Flaubert (1885), 222. English translation by Ernest Tristan and G.F. Monkshood, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1910), 254.
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Numero pondere et mensura Deus omnia condidit.
God created everything by number, weight and measure.
On more than one occasion, Newton wrote these Latin words as his autograph, with his signature below. A photo of one example, dated “London 11 Sep 1722,” can be seen in I. Hargitta (ed.), Symmetry 2: Unifying Human Understanding (2014), 837. Reprinted from M. and B. Rozsondai, 'Symmetry Aspects of Bookbindings', Computers Math. Applic. (1989), 17, No. 4-6, 837. On this piece of paper, Newton dedicated these words to a Hungarian student, Ferenc Páriz Pápai Jr., whose album is now held by the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Shelf-number Tort. naplók, kis 8⁰ 6). The sentiment existed long before Newton used it. In the Bible, Wisdom of Solomon, 11:20, it appears as “Pondere, mensura, numero Deus omnia fecit,” (Vulgate) which the King James Version translates as “thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.” Another Newton signed autograph with his Latin quote, dated 13 Jul 1716, sold (4 Apr 1991) for DM 9500 (about $31,000). See Dept of English, Temple University, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats (1991), 24-25, 230. A few years later, the sale (31 Mar 1998) of Newton's autograph cost the buyer $46,000. See Frank Ryan, Darwin's Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection (2002), 11-12. Other authors, including mathematicians, used the same Biblical passage. In Gilles Personne de Roberval's Aristarchi Samii de Mundi Systemate (1644), he frequently uses the abbreviation “P.N.E.M.” standing for “Pondere, mensura et mensura.” It was adopted as the motto of the Smeatonian Society of Engineers as “Omnia in Numero Pondere et Mensura.”
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On tue un homme, on est un assassin. On tue des millions d’hommes, on est un conquérant. On les tue tous, on est un dieu.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
Pensées d'un biologiste (1939), 116.
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Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.
The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not.
Remark during Einstein’s first visit to Princeton University (Apr/May 1921), responding to the news that a “non aether drift” had been found by Mount Vernon Observatory. As quoted by Banesh Hoffmann, in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (1972), 146. Later posted in the Einstein lounge at the Princeton Department of Mathematics Department. Einstein’s own translation given to Derek Price was “God is slick, but he ain't mean” (1946).
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Theologus esse volebam: diu angebar: Deus ecce mea opera etiam in astronomia celebratur.
I wanted to become a theologian. For a long time I was restless. Now, however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.
Letter to Michael Maestlin (3 Oct 1595). Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke (1937- ), Vol. 13, letter 23, l. 256-7, p. 40. As translated in Owen Gingerich, 'Johannes Kepler' article in Charles Coulston Gillespie (ed.) Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1973), Vol. 7, 291. Also seen translated as “I wanted to become a theologian; for a long time I was unhappy. Now, behold, God is praised by my work even in astronomy.”
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Thomasina: Every week I plot your equations dot for dot, x’s against y’s in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?
Septimus: We do.
Thomasina: Then why do your shapes describe only the shapes of manufacture?
Septimus: I do not know.
Thomasina: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.
In the play, Acadia (1993), Scene 3, 37.
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~~[Unverified]~~ Through steady observation and a meaningful contact with the divined order of the world’s structure, arranged by God’s wisdom,–who would not be guided to admire the Builder who creates all!
As quoted, without citation, in Adam Mabry, Life and Doctrine: How the Truth and Grace of Christian Story Change Everything (2001, 2014), 17. Also seen, without citation, in Katherine Katsanis, 'In This Age of Science And Technology, How Can we Accept The Reality of Miracles?', Orthodox Observer (Sep 1997), 21, attributed to Nikolai Copernicus. As yet, Webmaster cannot identify a trustworthy primary source, is therefore presently skeptical, and meanwhile labels the quote as unverified.
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A century ago, Darwin and his friends were thought to be dangerous atheists, but their heresy simply replaced a benevolent personal deity called God by a benevolent impersonal deity called Evolution. In their different ways Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley both believed in Fate.
From transcript of BBC radio Reith Lecture (12 Nov 1967), 'A Runaway World', on the bbc.co.uk website.
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A contradiction (between science and religion) is out of the question. What follows from science are, again and again, clear indications of God’s activity which can be so strongly perceived that Kepler dared to say (for us it seems daring, not for him) that he could ‘almost touch God with his hand in the Universe.’
…...
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A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jellyfish and a saurian,
And caves where the cavemen dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty,
And a face turned from the clod—
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
'Each in his Own Tongue', in Kansas in Literature: Part One, Poetry (1900), 83.
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A game is on, at the other end of this infinite distance, and heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason you cannot leave either; according to reason you cannot leave either undone... Yes, but wager you must; there is no option, you have embarked on it. So which will you have. Come. Since you must choose, let us see what concerns you least. You have two things to lose: truth and good, and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness. And your nature has two things to shun: error and misery. Your reason does not suffer by your choosing one more than the other, for you must choose. That is one point cleared. But your happiness? Let us weigh gain and loss in calling heads that God is. Reckon these two chances: if you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose naught. Then do not hesitate, wager that He is.
Pensées (1670), Section I, aphorism 223. In H. F. Stewart (ed.), Pascal's Pensées (1950), 117-119.
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A God all mercy is a God unjust.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 144
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A man with God is always in the majority.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 144
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A men whose every word is nothing but the truth is not a human being but a god! Gods do not die, whereas Aristotle is lying in a grave now.
From the play Galileo Galilei (2001) .
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A persistent and age-old instinct makes us want to wander
Into regions yet untrod
And read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God.
Address upon receiving the Perkin Medal Award, 'The Big Things in Chemistry', The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (Feb 1921), 13, No. 2, 163. These lines concluded his remarks, without citation, and since Webmaster has found no other source has assumed the words are his own. Contact Webmaster if you know a different primary source.
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A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
In Gravity and Grace, (1947, 1952), 105.
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A single swallow, it is said, devours ten millions of insects every year. The supplying of these insects I take to be a signal instance of the Creator's bounty in providing for the lives of His creatures.
Attributed to Henry Ward Beecher as a quote under the definition of 'Bounty' in Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (1911), Vol. 7, The Devil's Dictionary, 40. Webmaster has not yet found a primary print source confirming the quote is by Beecher, and thus presently lists it under Bierce. Please contact webmaster if you know a primary print source for Beecher.
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A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data. God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.
In Scientific American (May 1963). As quoted and cited in The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Science (1998), 468.
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A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office with a question that had clearly been troubling him deeply. He said to me, ‘I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and in evolution?’ Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, a nd reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief –a position that I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.
…...
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A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Epigrams of Programming
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A. R. Todd
Thinks he’s God.
N. F. Mott
Says he’s not.
Anonymous
Quoted by William Lord in The Times (22 Jan 1997), remarking on the competitiveness between the Physics and Chemistry Departments at the University of Cambridge.
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According to Gandhi, the seven sins are wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle. Well, Hubert Humphrey may have sinned in the eyes of God, as we all do, but according to those definitions of Gandhi’s, it was Hubert Humphrey without sin.
Eulogy at funeral of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, St. Paul, Minnesota (16 Jan 1978). In Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter (1978), Vol. 1, 82.
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According to the Boshongo people of central Africa, in the beginning, there was only darkness, water, and the great god Bumba. One day Bumba, in pain from a stomach ache, vomited up the sun. The sun dried up some of the water, leaving land. Still in pain, Bumba vomited up the moon, the stars, and then some animals. The leopard, the crocodile, the turtle, and finally, man. This creation myth, like many others, tries to answer the questions we all ask. Why are we here? Where did we come from?
Lecture (1987), 'The Origin of the Universe', collected in Black Holes And Baby Universes And Other Essays (1993), 99.
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According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.
'Mr. Leibniz's First Paper' (1715). In H. G. Alexander (ed.), The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1956), 11-2.
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.
In 'December: Pines above the Snow', A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949, 1987), 81.
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Acute [diseases] meaning those of which God is the author, chronic meaning those that originate in ourselves.
'Epistolary Dissertation to Dr. Cole', in The Works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D. (1850), trans. by R. G. Latham, Vol. 2, 68.
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Adam Smith says that nobody ever imagined a god of weight—and he might have added, of the multiplication table either. It may be that the relations of Nature are all as inevitable as that twice two are four.
From chapter 'Jottings from a Note-book', in Canadian Stories (1918), 178.
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After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
'Beetles' Other People’s Trades (1985, trans. 1989).
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Alas, your dear friend and servant is totally blind. Henceforth this heaven, this universe, which by wonderful observations I had enlarged by a hundred and a thousand times beyond the conception of former ages, is shrunk for me into the narrow space which I myself fill in it. So it pleases God; it shall therefore please me also.
In Letter, as quoted in Sir Oliver Lodge, Pioneers of Science (1905), 133.
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Alcoholism, the opium habit and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation; the grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its strangle-hold and more than one hundred million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god.
In Tobaccoism: or, How Tobacco Kills (1922), Preface, 7.
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All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.
Dune (1965), 406
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All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.
Dune (1965), 406
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All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.
Dune (1965), 406
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All of us Hellenes tell lies … about those great Gods, the Sun and the Moon… . We say that they, and diverse other stars, do not keep the same path, and we call them planets or wanderers. … Each of them moves in the same path-not in many paths, but in one only, which is circular, and the varieties are only apparent.
Plato
In Plato and B. Jowett (trans.), The Dialogues of Plato: Laws (3rd ed., 1892), Vol. 5, 204-205.
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All other men, being born of woman, have a navel, by reason of the umbilical vessels inserted into it, which from the placenta carry nourishment to children in the womb of their mothers; but it could not be so with our first parents. It cannot be believed that God gave them navels which would have been altogether useless.
A Treatise of Laws of Nature (1727).
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
'The Dilemma of Determinism' (1884). In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), 147.
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All science has God as its author and giver. Much is heard of the conflict between science and religion, and of the contrast between sacred and secular. There may be aspects of truth to which religion is the gate, as indeed there are aspects of truth to which particular sciences are the gate. But if there be a Creator, and if truth be one of his attributes, then everything that is true can claim his authorship, and every search for truth can claim his authority.
In Margaret Duggan (ed.), Through the Year with Michael Ramsey: Devotional Readings for Every Day (1975).
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All that biology tells us about the nature of God is that he has “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
As stated in George Evelyn Hutchison, 'Homage to Santa Rosalia, or Why Are There So Many Kinds of Animals?', The American Naturalist (1959), 93, 145-159.
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All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection. Thus men are linked with the animals, these with the plants and these with the fossils which in turn merge with those bodies which our senses and our imagination represent to us as absolutely inanimate. And, since the law of continuity requires that when the essential attributes of one being approximate those of another all the properties of the one must likewise gradually approximate those of the other, it is necessary that all the orders of natural beings form but a single chain, in which the various classes, like so many rings, are so closely linked one to another that it is impossible for the senses or the imagination to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins?all the species which, so to say, lie near the borderlands being equivocal, at endowed with characters which might equally well be assigned to either of the neighboring species. Thus there is nothing monstrous in the existence zoophytes, or plant-animals, as Budaeus calls them; on the contrary, it is wholly in keeping with the order of nature that they should exist. And so great is the force of the principle of continuity, to my thinking, that not only should I not be surprised to hear that such beings had been discovered?creatures which in some of their properties, such as nutrition or reproduction, might pass equally well for animals or for plants, and which thus overturn the current laws based upon the supposition of a perfect and absolute separation of the different orders of coexistent beings which fill the universe;?not only, I say, should I not be surprised to hear that they had been discovered, but, in fact, I am convinced that there must be such creatures, and that natural history will perhaps some day become acquainted with them, when it has further studied that infinity of living things whose small size conceals them for ordinary observation and which are hidden in the bowels of the earth and the depth of the sea.
Lettre Prétendue de M. De Leibnitz, à M. Hermann dont M. Koenig a Cité le Fragment (1753), cxi-cxii, trans. in A. O. Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936), 144-5.
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All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
In Religio Medici (1642, 1754), pt. 1, sec. 16, 42.
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Almighty God, to whose efficacious Word all things owe their original, abounding in his own glorious Essence with infinite goodness and fecundity, did in the beginning Create Man after his own likeness, Male and Female, created he them; the true distinction of which Sexes, consists merely in the different site of those parts of the body, wherein Generation necessarily requires a Diversity: for both Male and Female he impartially endued with the same, and altogether indifferent form of Soul, the Woman being possess’d of no less excellent Faculties of Mind, Reason, and Speech, than the Man, and equally with him aspiring to those Regions of Bliss and Glory, where there shall be no exception of Sex.
In Female Pre-eminence: Or, The Dignity and Excellency of that Sex above the Male, translation (1670).
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Although the works of the Creator may be in themselves all equally perfect, the animal is, as I see it, the most complete work of nature, and man is her masterpiece.
'Histoire des Animaux', Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, Avec la Description du Cabinet du Roi (1749), Vol. 2, 2. Quoted in Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth -Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson and trans. Robert Ellrich (1997), 437.
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Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
In What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the Ship “Beagle” 1879, 170.
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Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature: no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
Journal of Researches: into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (1839), ch. XXIII, 604-5.
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An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.
Quoted in Clifford A. Pickover, A Passion for Mathematics (2005), 1; but with no footnote to primary source.
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Anaximenes ... said that infinite air was the principle, from which the things that are becoming, and that are, and that shall be, and gods and things divine, all come into being, and the rest from its products. The form of air is of this kind: whenever it is most equable it is invisible to sight, but is revealed by the cold and the hot and the damp and by movement. It is always in motion; for things that change do not change unless there be movement. Through becoming denser or finer it has different appearances; for when it is dissolved into what is finer it becomes fire, while winds, again, are air that is becoming condensed, and cloud is produced from air by felting. When it is condensed still more, water is produced; with a further degree of condensation earth is produced, and when condensed as far as possible, stones. The result is that the most influential components of the generation are opposites, hot and cold.
Hippolytus, Refutation, 1.7.1. In G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield (eds.), The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (1983), p. 145.
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And for rejecting such a Medium, we have the Authority of those the oldest and most celebrated Philosophers of Greece and Phoenicia, who made a Vacuum, and Atoms, and the Gravity of Atoms, the first Principles of their Philosophy; tacitly attributing Gravity to some other Cause than dense Matter. Later Philosophers banish the Consideration of such a Cause out of natural Philosophy, feigning Hypotheses for explaining all things mechanically, and referring other Causes to Metaphysicks: Whereas the main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phaenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the Mechanism of the World, but chiefly to resolve these and such like Questions. What is there in places almost empty of Matter, and whence is it that the Sun and Planets gravitate towards one another, without dense Matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that Order and Beauty which we see in the World? ... does it not appear from phaenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself.
In Opticks, (1704, 2nd. Ed. 1718), Book 3, Query 28, 343-5. Newton’s reference to “Nature does nothing in vain” recalls the axiom from Aristotle, which may be seen as “Natura nihil agit frustra” in the Aristotle Quotes on this web site.
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And from this such small difference of eight minutes [of arc] it is clear why Ptolemy, since he was working with bisection [of the linear eccentricity], accepted a fixed equant point… . For Ptolemy set out that he actually did not get below ten minutes [of arc], that is a sixth of a degree, in making observations. To us, on whom Divine benevolence has bestowed the most diligent of observers, Tycho Brahe, from whose observations this eight-minute error of Ptolemy’s in regard to Mars is deduced, it is fitting that we accept with grateful minds this gift from God, and both acknowledge and build upon it. So let us work upon it so as to at last track down the real form of celestial motions (these arguments giving support to our belief that the assumptions are incorrect). This is the path I shall, in my own way, strike out in what follows. For if I thought the eight minutes in [ecliptic] longitude were unimportant, I could make a sufficient correction (by bisecting the [linear] eccentricity) to the hypothesis found in Chapter 16. Now, because they could not be disregarded, these eight minutes alone will lead us along a path to the reform of the whole of Astronomy, and they are the matter for a great part of this work.
Astronomia Nova, New Astronomy (1609), ch. 19, 113-4, Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke (1937-), Vol. 3, 177-8.
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And from true lordship it follows that the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; from the other perfections, that he is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, he endures from eternity to eternity; and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), 3rd edition (1726), trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (1999), General Scholium, 941.
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And God made two great lights, great for their use
To man, the greater to have rule by day, The less by night…
Paradise Lost: A poem, in Twelve Books (1750), Book 7, 36-37.
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And God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.” And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
Bible
(circa 725 B.C.)
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And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
Bible
From Genesis, I, 24, in The Holy Bible (1756), 2.
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And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also.
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(circa 725 B.C.)
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And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.
Bible
From Genesis, I, 31, in The Holy Bible (1756), 2.
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And how admirable and rare an ornament, O good God, is mildenesse in a divine? And how much is it to be wished in this age, that all divines were mathematicians? that is men gentle and meeke.
Trigonometria (1595), trans. R. Handson (1614), Epistle Dedicatorie.
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And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.
Bible
Amos 8:9. As in The Holy Bible, Or Divine Treasury (1804), 75.
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And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.
As quoted in 'Playboy Interview: Salvador Dalí, a candid conversation with the flamboyantly eccentric grand vizier of surrealism', Playboy Magazine (Jul 1964). Also in Alan Lindsay Mackay, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991), 66.
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And so many think incorrectly that everything was created by the Creator in the beginning as it is seen, that not only the mountains, valleys, and waters, but also various types of minerals occurred together with the rest of the world, and therefore it is said that it is unnecessary to investigate the reasons why they differ in their internal properties and their locations. Such considerations are very dangerous for the growth of all the sciences, and hence for natural knowledge of the Earth, particularly the art of mining, though it is very easy for those clever people to be philosophers, having learnt by heart the three words 'God so created' and to give them in reply in place of all reasons.
About the Layers of the Earth and other Works on Geology (1757), trans. A. P. Lapov (1949), 55.
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And therefore, sir, as you desire to live,
A day or two before your laxative,
Take just three worms, nor under nor above,
Because the gods unequal numbers love.
These digestives prepare you for your purge,
Of fumetery, centaury, and spurge;
And of ground-ivy add a leaf or two.
All which within our yard or garden grow.
Eat these, and be, my lord, of better cheer:
Your father’s son was never born to fear.
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And when with excellent Microscopes I discern in otherwise invisible Objects the Inimitable Subtlety of Nature’s Curious Workmanship; And when, in a word, by the help of Anatomicall Knives, and the light of Chymicall Furnaces, I study the Book of Nature, and consult the Glosses of Aristotle, Epicurus, Paracelsus, Harvey, Helmont, and other learn'd Expositors of that instructive Volumne; I find my self oftentimes reduc’d to exclaim with the Psalmist, How manifold are thy works, O Lord? In wisdom hast thou made them all.
Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (1659), 56-7.
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And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.
In Galileo’s handwriting is his personal copy of Dialogue on the Great World Systems, x. As quoted in Edward Aloysius Pace and James Hugh Ryan, The New Scholasticism (1954),
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Anton Chekhov wrote that ‘one must not put a loaded rifle on stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’ Good drama requires spare and purposive action, sensible linking of potential causes with realized effects. Life is much messier; nothing happens most of the time. Millions of Americans (many hotheaded) own rifles (many loaded), but the great majority, thank God, do not go off most of the time. We spend most of real life waiting for Godot, not charging once more unto the breach.
…...
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Anyway, I'm sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war. I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.
Spoken by fictional character Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in the Rye (1951), 183.
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Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life; ...
'So careful of the type', but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go' ...
Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law—
Tho’ Nature red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed...
In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), Cantos 56-57. Collected in Alfred Tennyson and William James Rolfe (ed.) The Poetic and Dramatic works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1898), 176.
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Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life…
So careful of the type, but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go.”
From poem, 'In Memoriam A.H.H.' written between 1833-50, and first published anonymously in 1850. Collected in Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson (1860), Vol.2, 64.
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Art gallery? Who needs it? Look up at the swirling silver-lined clouds in the magnificent blue sky or at the silently blazing stars at midnight. How could indoor art be any more masterfully created than God’s museum of nature?
…...
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As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.
From A Logical Point of View (1953), 44. [Note: “qua” means “in the character or role of,” thus “qua lay physicist” means “in the role of lay physicist,” or perhaps even (?) “putting on my lay physicist hat.” —Webmaster]
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As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.
In Fortune of the Republic (1878), 3.
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As far as I see, such a theory [of the primeval atom] remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being. He may keep, for the bottom of space-time, the same attitude of mind he has been able to adopt for events occurring in non-singular places in space-time. For the believer, it removes any attempt to familiarity with God, as were Laplace’s chiquenaude or Jeans’ finger. It is consonant with the wording of Isaiah speaking of the “Hidden God” hidden even in the beginning of the universe … Science has not to surrender in face of the Universe and when Pascal tries to infer the existence of God from the supposed infinitude of Nature, we may think that he is looking in the wrong direction.
From 'The Primeval Atom Hypothesis and the Problem of Clusters of Galaxies', in R. Stoops (ed.), La Structure et l'Evolution de l'Univers (1958), 1-32. As translated in Helge Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe (1996), 60.
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As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish.
Expressing skepticism that adventure does not necessarily contribute to scientific knowledge.
'Penguin's Eggs'. From the American Mercury (Sep 1930), 123-24. Reprinted in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy: A New Selection from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (2006), 167.
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As knowledge advances, science ceases to scoff at religion; and religion ceases to frown on science. The hour of mockery by the one, and of reproof by the other, is passing away. Henceforth, they will dwell together in unity and goodwill. They will mutually illustrate the wisdom, power, and grace of God. Science will adorn and enrich religion; and religion will ennoble and sanctify science.
In Tryon Edwards, A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908), 505.
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As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or, rather, Agency—must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?
In The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos (1988), 27.
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Ask why God made the GEM so small,
And why so huge the granite?
Because God meant, mankind should set
That higher value on it.
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At first men try with magic charms
To fertilize the earth,
To keep their flocks and herds from harm
And bring new young to birth.

Then to capricious gods they turn
To save from fire or flood;
Their smoking sacrifices burn
On altars red with blood.

Next bold philosopher and sage
A settled plan decree
And prove by thought or sacred page
What Nature ought to be.

But Nature smiles—a Sphinx-like smile
Watching their little day
She waits in patience for a while—
Their plans dissolve away.

Then come those humbler men of heart
With no completed scheme,
Content to play a modest part,
To test, observe, and dream.

Till out of chaos come in sight
Clear fragments of a Whole;
Man, learning Nature’s ways aright
Obeying, can control.
Epigraph in A History of Science and Its Relation with Philosophy & Religion (1968), vi.
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At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.
Plato
In the Phaedrus. Collected in Plato the Teacher (1897), 171. A footnote gives that Naucratis was a city in the Delta of Egypt, on a branch of the Nile.
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At the entrance to the observatory Stjerneborg located underground, Tycho Brahe built a Ionic portal. On top of this were three sculptured lions. On both sides were inscriptions and on the backside was a longer inscription in gold letters on a porfyr stone: Consecrated to the all-good, great God and Posterity. Tycho Brahe, Son of Otto, who realized that Astronomy, the oldest and most distinguished of all sciences, had indeed been studied for a long time and to a great extent, but still had not obtained sufficient firmness or had been purified of errors, in order to reform it and raise it to perfection, invented and with incredible labour, industry, and expenditure constructed various exact instruments suitable for all kinds of observations of the celestial bodies, and placed them partly in the neighbouring castle of Uraniborg, which was built for the same purpose, partly in these subterranean rooms for a more constant and useful application, and recommending, hallowing, and consecrating this very rare and costly treasure to you, you glorious Posterity, who will live for ever and ever, he, who has both begun and finished everything on this island, after erecting this monument, beseeches and adjures you that in honour of the eternal God, creator of the wonderful clockwork of the heavens, and for the propagation of the divine science and for the celebrity of the fatherland, you will constantly preserve it and not let it decay with old age or any other injury or be removed to any other place or in any way be molested, if for no other reason, at any rate out of reverence to the creator’s eye, which watches over the universe. Greetings to you who read this and act accordingly. Farewell!
(Translated from the original in Latin)
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At their best, at their most creative, science and engineering are attributes of liberty—noble expressions of man’s God-given right to investigate and explore the universe without fear of social or political or religious reprisals.
From 'Sarnoff Honored by I.R.E.', in Department of Information of the Radio Corporation of America, Radio Age: Research, Manufacturing, Communications, Broadcasting (Apr 1953), 12, No. 2, 32.
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Batter my heart, three-personed God …
Holy Sonnets, No. 14. Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 164
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Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.
Quoting from the Quran. Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 238
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Before God we are all equally wise–and equally foolish.
As quoted, without citation, in Albert Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931), 105.
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Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought, Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught, The wise, for cure, on exercise depend; God never made his work for man to mend.
'To my Honoured Kinsman, John Dryden', The English Poets (1901), Vol. 2, 491.
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Between the lowest and the highest degree of spiritual and corporal perfection, there is an almost infinite number of intermediate degrees. The succession of degrees comprises the Universal Chain. It unites all beings, ties together all worlds, embraces all the spheres. One SINGLE BEING is outside this chain, and this is HE who made it.
Contemplation de la nature (1764), Vol. I, 27. Trans. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), 23.
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Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. ... There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow.
From 'Circles', collected in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1903), 308.
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Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.
Lecture, 'Religion and Natural Science' (1937) In Max Planck and Frank Gaynor (trans.), Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949), 184.
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Both Religion and science require faith in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations.
Anonymous
Sometimes seen attributed (doubtfully?) to Max Planck. Widely seen on the web, but always without citation. Webmaster has not yet found any evidence in print that this is a valid Planck quote, and must be skeptical that it is. Contact Webmaster if you know a primary source.
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But as a philosopher said, one day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, after all the scientific and technological achievements, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Speech accepting nomination as candidate for vice president, Democratic National Committee, Washington, D.C. (8 Aug 1972) as reported in New York Times (9 Aug 1972), 18. Shriver slightly paraphrased the similar sentiment written in 1934 by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, translated by René Hague in 'The Evolution of Chastity', Toward the Future (1975), 86-87.
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But here it may be objected, that the present Earth looks like a heap of Rubbish and Ruines; And that there are no greater examples of confusion in Nature than Mountains singly or jointly considered; and that there appear not the least footsteps of any Art or Counsel either in the Figure and Shape, or Order and Disposition of Mountains and Rocks. Wherefore it is not likely they came so out of God's hands ... To which I answer, That the present face of the Earth with all its Mountains and Hills, its Promontaries and Rocks, as rude and deformed as they appear, seems to me a very beautiful and pleasant object, and with all the variety of Hills, and Valleys, and Inequalities far more grateful to behold, than a perfectly level Countrey without any rising or protuberancy, to terminate the sight: As anyone that hath but seen the Isle of Ely, or any the like Countrey must need acknowledge.
John Ray
Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (1692), 165-6.
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But how is one to determine what is pleasing to God? ... Whatever is unpleasant to man is pleasant to God. The test is the natural instinct of man. If there arises within one’s dark recesses a hot desire to do this or that, then it is the paramount duty of a Christian to avoid doing this or that. And if, on the contrary, one cherishes an abhorrence of the business, then one must tackle it forthwith, all the time shouting ‘Hallelujah!’ A simple enough religion, surely–simple, satisfying and idiotic.
…...
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But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.
Letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany: (1615). In Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (1957), 183.
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But that which will excite the greatest astonishment by far, and which indeed especially moved me to call the attention of all astronomers and philosophers, is this: namely, that I have observed four planets, neither known nor observed by any one of the astronomers before my time, which have their orbits round a certain bright star [Jupiter], one of those previously known, like Venus or Mercury round the sun, and are sometimes in front of it, sometimes behind it, though they never depart from it beyond certain limits. All of which facts were discovered and observed a few days ago by the help of a telescope devised by me, through God’s grace first enlightening my mind.
In pamphlet, The Sidereal Messenger (1610), reprinted in The Sidereal Messenger of Galileo Galilei: And a Part of the Preface to the Preface to Kepler's Dioptrics Containing the Original Account of Galileo's Astronomical Discoveries (1880), 9.
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But the World being once fram’d, and the course of Nature establish’d, the Naturalist, (except in some few cases, where God, or Incorporeal Agents interpose), has recourse to the first Cause but for its general and ordinary Support and Influence, whereby it preserves Matter and Motion from Annihilation or Desition; and in explicating particular phenomena, considers onely the Size, Shape, Motion, (or want of it) Texture, and the resulting Qualities and Attributes of the small particles of Matter.
The Origine of Formes and Qualities (1666), 194.
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But without effort [God] sets in motion all things by mind and thought.
Quoted in Arthur Fairbanks (ed. And trans.), The First Philosophers of Greece (1898), 69, fragment 3.
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By God’s mercy British and American science outpaced all German efforts. … This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension. We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations, and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe, may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.
[Concerning use of the atomic bomb.]
Statement drafted by Churchill following the use of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Due to the change in government, the statement was released by Clement Attlee (6 Aug 1945). In Sir Winston Churchill, Victory: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston Churchill (1946), 289.
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By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,
Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.
We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,
Distill him for physic and grind him for paint,
Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,
And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.
O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:
For respecting the dead what’s the limit of time?
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Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?
In letter to California State board of Education (14 Sep 1972).
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Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?
The Brothers Karamazov. Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 143
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Can we actually “know” the universe? My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
In Getting Even (1971).
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Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and confirmed. They are no exception to the rule that God always geometrizes. Their problems of form are in the first instance mathematical problems, their problems of growth are essentially physical problems, and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science.
On Growth and Form (1917), 7-8.
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Chance may be the pseudonym God uses when He doesn't want to sign His name.
As quoted, without citation, by Marcus Bach, 'Serendiptiy in the Business World', in The Rotarian (Oct 1981), 139, No. 4, 40. If you know the primary source, please contact Webmaster.
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Charles Darwin, the Abraham of scientific men—a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God.
In 'Science and Man', Fragments of Science (1879), Vol. 2, 370. Pesidential Address to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, 1877, in 'Science and Man', Fragments of Science for Unscientific People: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews (1879), Vol. 2, 370.
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Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.
Anonymous
Years after his death, this has been misattributed to Albert Einstein. Webmaster has found no primary source that he ever said or wrote these words. In a web article 'Chance, Coincidence, Miracles, Pseudonyms, and God', Quote Investigator lists a number of precursor variants as sayings dating back to 1777.
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Come celebrate with me in song the name
Of Newton, to the Muses dear, for he
Unlocked the hidden treasures of truth …
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.
From final verse of his much longer 'Ode to Newton'. As translated from the Latin of the version in the first edition, by Leon J. Richardson. In Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World: Newton’s Principia: Motte’s Translation Revised (1934, 2022), xv. The Ode was prefaced to all three editions of Isaac Newton’s Principia, which Halley funded, edited and oversaw for its printing.
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Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
…...
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Concerning alchemy it is more difficult to discover the actual state of things, in that the historians who specialise in this field seem sometimes to be under the wrath of God themselves; for, like those who write of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy or on Spanish politics, they seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.
The Origins of Modern Science (1949), 115.
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Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist, nor what sort of form they may have; there are many reasons why knowledge on this subject is not possible, owing to the lack of evidence and the shortness of human life.
Protagoras, fr. 1, quoted in E. Hussey, The Pre-Socratics (1972), 109.
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Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
'The Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes', Scientific American, 1977, 236, 40.
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Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the “Mona Lisa” painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
Baccalaureate address (9 Jun 1957), Yale University. In In the University Tradition (1957), 156.
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Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life—yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammarabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
'75 Years and Still No Peace'. Humanist (Sep 2000)
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Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction.
Opening sentences of Chapter 1,'The Aims of Education', in Aims of Education and Other Essays (1917), 1.
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Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach. I now see scientific accomplishments as a path, not an end; a path leading to and disappearing in mystery. Science, in fact, forms many paths branching from the trunk of human progress; and on every periphery they end in the miraculous. Following these paths far enough, one must eventually conclude that science itself is a miracle—like the awareness of man arising from and then disappearing in the apparent nothingness of space. Rather than nullifying religion and proving that “God is dead,” science enhances spiritual values by revealing the magnitudes and minitudes—from cosmos to atom—through which man extends and of which he is composed.
A Letter From Lindbergh', Life (4 Jul 1969), 60B. In Eugene C. Gerhart, Quote it Completely! (1998), 409.
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Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don’t struggle to get them right.
…...
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Deus ex machina.
[The God from the machine.]
In 'Philopseudes', Sec. 29, as well as in 'Hermotimus', Sec. 86 (c.170 AD). Meaning: In ancient Greek or Roman drama, a god introduced into a play to resolve the entanglements of the plot (and could be lowered by stage crane machinery). In fiction, any artificial or improbable device contriving a solution to difficulties of a plot.
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DNA that used to have some function way back in evolution but currently does not (and might possibly be revived if, say, an ancient parasite reappeared), DNA that controls how genes switch their protein manufacturing on and off, DNA that controls those, and so on. Some may actually be genuine junk. And some (so the joke goes) may encode a message like ‘It was me, I’m God, I existed all along, ha ha.’
With co-author Jack Cohen. In Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Chap. 26, 'The Descent of Darwin', The Science of Discworld (1999), 193. Pratchett wrote the fantasy story told in the odd-numbered chapters. Following each, relevant real science is provided by his co-authors, Stewart and Cohen, in the even-numbered chapters (such as Chap. 26), but which of the two wrote which lines, is not designated. As the biologist, perhaps it was Jack Cohen who wrote this.
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Do these models give a pointer to God? The steady-state universe, the Hawking model... and the infinitely oscillating model decidedly do not. One might almost regard them as models manufactured for a Society of Atheists.
'From Entropy to God', in K. Martinas, L. Ropolyi and P. Szegedi (eds.) Thermodynamics: History and Philosophy: Facts, Trends, Debates (1991), 386.
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Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of the things in the past that the physicists—at the time—didn’t understand … [but now we do understand.] If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance, that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller, as time moves on. So just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem. That’s simply the “God of the Gaps” argument that’s been around for ever.
From interview, The Science Studio video series of The Science Network website, episode 'The Moon, the Tides and why Neil DeGrasse Tyson is Colbert’s God' (20 Jan 2011), time 26:58-27:55.
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Doesn’t it strike you as odd
That a commonplace fellow like Todd Should spell if you please,
His name with two Ds.
When one is sufficient for God.
Anonymous
Quoted by M. G. De St. V. Atkins, The Times (22 Jan 1997), from memory of a conversation with 'an American tribiologist' who recalled it as current when he was an undergraduate at Christ's College.
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Doubtless the reasoning faculty, the mind, is the leading and characteristic attribute of the human race. By the exercise of this, man arrives at the properties of the natural bodies. This is science, properly and emphatically so called. It is the science of pure mathematics; and in the high branches of this science lies the truly sublime of human acquisition. If any attainment deserves that epithet, it is the knowledge, which, from the mensuration of the minutest dust of the balance, proceeds on the rising scale of material bodies, everywhere weighing, everywhere measuring, everywhere detecting and explaining the laws of force and motion, penetrating into the secret principles which hold the universe of God together, and balancing worlds against worlds, and system against system. When we seek to accompany those who pursue studies at once so high, so vast, and so exact; when we arrive at the discoveries of Newton, which pour in day on the works of God, as if a second fiat had gone forth from his own mouth; when, further, we attempt to follow those who set out where Newton paused, making his goal their starting-place, and, proceeding with demonstration upon demonstration, and discovery upon discovery, bring new worlds and new systems of worlds within the limits of the known universe, failing to learn all only because all is infinite; however we may say of man, in admiration of his physical structure, that “in form and moving he is express and admirable,” it is here, and here without irreverence, we may exclaim, “In apprehension how like a god!” The study of the pure mathematics will of course not be extensively pursued in an institution, which, like this [Boston Mechanics’ Institute], has a direct practical tendency and aim. But it is still to be remembered, that pure mathematics lie at the foundation of mechanical philosophy, and that it is ignorance only which can speak or think of that sublime science as useless research or barren speculation.
In Works (1872), Vol. 1, 180.
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Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
…...
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Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics because of this element of chance and uncertainty. He said: God does not play dice. It seems that Einstein was doubly wrong. The quantum effects of black holes suggests that not only does God play dice, He sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
…...
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Einstein uses his concept of God more often than a Catholic priest. Once I asked him:
'Tomorrow is Sunday. Do you want me to come to you, so we can work?'
'Why not?'
'Because I thought perhaps you would like to rest on Sunday.'
Einstein settled the question by saying with a loud laugh: 'God does not rest on Sunday either.'
Quest: The Evolution of a Scientist (1941), 247.
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Einstein was wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice'. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.
In The Nature Of Space And Time (1996, 2010), 26.
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Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law, and that the taught intellect can even govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man.
Notes for a Friday Discourse at the Royal Institution (1858).
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Endowed with two qualities, which seemed incompatible with each other, a volcanic imagination and a pertinacity of intellect which the most tedious numerical calculations could not daunt, Kepler conjectured that the movements of the celestial bodies must be connected together by simple laws, or, to use his own expression, by harmonic laws. These laws he undertook to discover. A thousand fruitless attempts, errors of calculation inseparable from a colossal undertaking, did not prevent him a single instant from advancing resolutely toward the goal of which he imagined he had obtained a glimpse. Twenty-two years were employed by him in this investigation, and still he was not weary of it! What, in reality, are twenty-two years of labor to him who is about to become the legislator of worlds; who shall inscribe his name in ineffaceable characters upon the frontispiece of an immortal code; who shall be able to exclaim in dithyrambic language, and without incurring the reproach of anyone, “The die is cast; I have written my book; it will be read either in the present age or by posterity, it matters not which; it may well await a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an interpreter of his words.”
In 'Eulogy on Laplace', in Smithsonian Report for the year 1874 (1875), 131-132.
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Euler was a believer in God, downright and straightforward. The following story is told by Thiebault, in his Souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin, … Thiebault says that he has no personal knowledge of the truth of the story, but that it was believed throughout the whole of the north of Europe. Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of the Empress. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the Court circle a good deal of lively atheism. The Empress was much amused, but some of her counsellors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expositions of doctrine. The Empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest’s tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced toward Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction:
Monsieur, (a + bn) / n = x, donc Dieu existe; repondez!

Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.
In Budget of Paradoxes (1878), 251. [The declaration in French expresses, “therefore God exists; please answer!” This Euler-Diderot anecdote, as embellished by De Morgan, is generally regarded as entirely fictional. Diderot before he became an encyclopedist was an accomplished mathematician and fully capable of recognizing—and responding to—the absurdity of an algebraic expression in proving the existence of God. See B.H. Brown, 'The Euler-Diderot Anecdote', The American Mathematical Monthly (May 1942), 49, No. 5, 392-303. —Webmaster.]
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Even a god cannot change the past.
Agathon
As loosely translated from a quote by Aristotle: “Hence Agathon is right in saying ‘This only is denied even to God, The power to make what has been done undone.’”. As quoted by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chap. 2, translation by H. Rackham (1934). Also seen as “The one thing which even God cannot do is to make undone what has been done,” in Susan Ratcliffe (ed.), Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations (2011), 329.
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Even the gods dwelt in the woods.
Virgil
From the original Latin, “Habitarunt di quoque silvas”, in Eclogues (37 BC), book II, line 60, in Johannes Christianus Jahn (ed.), P. Virgilii Maronis: Opera Omnia (1825), 7. As translated in ‎Henry Rushton Fairclough, Virgil (1956), Vol. 1, 15. Eclogues is also known as Bucolica.
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Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.
…...
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Every man should eat and drink and enjoy the fruit of all his labor; it is the gift of God.
Bible
(circa 725 B.C.)
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Every new discovery of science is a further 'revelation' of the order which God has built into His universe.
Magazine, Look (5 Apr 1955), 30.
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Every scientist, through personal study and research, completes himself and his own humanity. ... Scientific research constitutes for you, as it does for many, the way for the personal encounter with truth, and perhaps the privileged place for the encounter itself with God, the Creator of heaven and earth. Science shines forth in all its value as a good capable of motivating our existence, as a great experience of freedom for truth, as a fundamental work of service. Through research each scientist grows as a human being and helps others to do likewise.
Address to the members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (13 Nov 2000). In L’Osservatore Romano (29 Nov 2000), translated in English edition, 5.
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Everything around us is filled with mystery and magic. I find this no cause for despair, no reason to turn for solace to esoteric formulae or chariots of gods. On the contrary, our inability to find easy answers fills me with a fierce pride in our ambivalent biology … with a constant sense of wonder and delight that we should be part of anything so profound.
In Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (1979), 14.
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Everything in nature is a puzzle until it finds its solution in man, who solves it in some way with God, and so completes the circle of creation.
The Appeal to Life (1891), 315.
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Everywhere you look in science, the harder it becomes to understand the universe without God.
…...
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Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.
In Pensées (1670), Section 10, 11. As translated in Blaise Pascal and W.F. Trotter (trans.), 'Thoughts', No. 248, collected in Charles W. Eliot (ed.), The Harvard Classics (1910), Vol. 48, 92. From the original French, “La foi est différente de la preuve: l’une est humaine, l’autre est un don de Dieu,” in Ernest Havet (ed.), Pensées de Pascal (1892), 276.
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False interpretation of the Bible has often clashed with science, as false science has with true interpretation; but true science is the natural ally of religion, for both are from God.
…...
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FAUSTUS: How many heavens or spheres are there?
MEPHASTOPHILIS: Nine: the seven planets, the firmament, and the empyreal heaven.
FAUSTUS: But is there not coelum igneum, et crystallinum?
MEPH.: No Faustus, they be but fables.
FAUSTUS: Resolve me then in this one question: Why are not conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses all at one time, but in some years we have more, in some less?
MEPH.: Per inaequalem motum respectu totius.
FAUSTUS: Well, I am answered. Now tell me who made the world.
MEPH.: I will not.
FAUSTUS: Sweet Mephastophilis, tell me.
MEPH.: Move me not, Faustus.
FAUSTUS: Villain, have I not bound thee to tell me any thing?
MEPH.: Ay, that is not against our kingdom.
This is. Thou are damn'd, think thou of hell.
FAUSTUS: Think, Faustus, upon God that made the world!
MEPH.: Remember this.
Doctor Faustus: A 1604-Version Edition, edited by Michael Keefer (1991), Act II, Scene iii, lines 60-77, 43-4.
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Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;—
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
In The Holy Grail: and Other Poems (1870), 165.
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Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into.
In Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887),8.
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For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible! Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have, any hold on him. A God who rewards and punishes is for him unthinkable, because man acts in accordance with an inner and outer necessity, and would, in the eyes of God, be as little responsible as an inanimate object is for the movements which it makes. Science, in consequence, has been accused of undermining morals—but wrongly. The ethical behavior of man is better based on sympathy, education and social relationships, and requires no support from religion. Man’s plight would, indeed, be sad if he had to be kept in order through fear of punishment and hope of rewards after death.
From 'Religion and Science', The New York Times Magazine, (9 Nov 1930), 1. Article in full, reprinted in Edward H. Cotton (ed.), Has Science Discovered God? A Symposium of Modern Scientific Opinion (1931), 101. The wording differs significantly from the version collected in 'Religion And Science', Ideas And Opinions (1954), 39, giving its source as: “Written expressly for the New York Times Magazine. Appeared there November 9, 1930 (pp. 1-4). The German text was published in the Berliner Tageblatt, November 11, 1930.” This variant form of the quote from the book begins, “The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation….” and is also on the Albert Einstein Quotes page on this website. As for why the difference, Webmaster speculates the book form editor perhaps used a revised translation from Einstein’s German article.
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For centuries and millenniums, God rested while man invented wheelbarrows and cars. God had not thought of inventing dynamite. Did he realize his own shortcomings when he saw what we could do? Did he approve of our remodeling of everything he had done?
In Ch. 1, 'Farewell to Civilization', Fatu-Hiva (1974), 6.
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For FRICTION is inevitable because the Universe is FULL of God's works.
For the PERPETUAL MOTION is in all works of Almighty GOD.
For it is not so in the engines of man, which are made of dead materials, neither indeed can be.
For the Moment of bodies, as it is used, is a false term—bless God ye Speakers on the Fifth of November.
For Time and Weight are by their several estimates.
For I bless GOD in the discovery of the LONGITUDE direct by the means of GLADWICK.
For the motion of the PENDULUM is the longest in that it parries resistance.
For the WEDDING GARMENTS of all men are prepared in the SUN against the day of acceptation.
For the wedding Garments of all women are prepared in the MOON against the day of their purification.
For CHASTITY is the key of knowledge as in Esdras, Sir Isaac Newton & now, God be praised, in me.
For Newton nevertheless is more of error than of the truth, but I am of the WORD of GOD.
From 'Jubilate Agno' (c.1758-1763), in N. Callan (ed.), The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart (1949), Vol. 1, 276.
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For God is like a skilfull Geometrician.
Religio Medici (1642), Part I, Section 16. In L. C. Martin (ed.), Thomas Browne: Religio Medici and Other Works (1964), 16.
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For God’s sake, please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life.
Having himself spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to prove Euclid's postulate that parallel lines do not meet, Farkas discouraged his son János from any further attempt.
Letter (1820) to his son, János Bolyai. Translation as in Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience (1981), 220. In Bill Swainson, Encarta Book of Quotations (2000), 124.
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For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think.
The Crisis in the University (1949), 183.
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For I am yearning to visit the limits of the all-nurturing Earth, and Oceans, from whom the gods are sprung.
Homer
Hera to Aphrodite in the Iliad, 14.201. As given in Norman K. Glendenning, Our Place in the Universe (2007), 126.
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For science, God is simplythe stream of tendency in which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being.
In Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873), 41.
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For the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God's commands. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words.
Letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany: Concerning the Use of Biblical Quotations in Matters of Science (1615), trans. Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957), 182-3.
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For the little that one has reflected on the origin of our knowledge, it is easy to perceive that we can acquire it only by means of comparison. That which is absolutely incomparable is wholly incomprehensible. God is the only example that we could give here. He cannot be comprehended, because he cannot be compared. But all which is susceptible of comparison, everything that we can perceive by different aspects, all that we can consider relatively, can always be judged according to our knowledge.
'Histoire naturelle de l'Homme', Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, Avec la Description du Cabinet du Roi (1749), Vol. 2, 431. Trans. Phillip R. Sloan.
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For the religious, passivism [i.e., objects are obedient to the laws of nature] provides a clear role of God as the author of the laws of nature. If the laws of nature are God’s commands for an essentially passive world…, God also has the power to suspend the laws of nature, and so perform miracles.
In The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism (2002), 2.
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For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods,
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
Much Ado about Nothing (1598-9), V, i.
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Force is no impelling god, no entity separate from the material substratum ; it is inseparable from matter, is one of its eternal indwelling properties.
As quoted in Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter: Or, Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe (1891), 1.
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Formerly one sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction! One therefore now tries the opposite direction: the way mankind is going shall serve as proof of his grandeur and kinship with God. Alas this, too, is vain! At the end of this way stands the funeral urn of the last man and gravedigger (with the inscription “nihil humani a me alienum puto”). However high mankind may have evolved—and perhaps at the end it will stand even lower than at the beginning!— it cannot pass over into a higher order, as little as the ant and the earwig can at the end of its “earthly course” rise up to kinship with God and eternal life. The becoming drags the has-been along behind it: why should an exception to this eternal spectacle be made on behalf of some little star or for any little species upon it! Away with such sentimentalities!
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1982), 32.
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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
In 'Philosophy, Religion, and So Forth', A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989), 4.
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From this fountain (the free will of God) it is those laws, which we call the laws of nature, have flowed, in which there appear many traces of the most wise contrivance, but not the least shadow of necessity. These therefore we must not seek from uncertain conjectures, but learn them from observations and experimental. He who is presumptuous enough to think that he can find the true principles of physics and the laws of natural things by the force alone of his own mind, and the internal light of his reason, must either suppose the world exists by necessity, and by the same necessity follows the law proposed; or if the order of Nature was established by the will of God, the [man] himself, a miserable reptile, can tell what was fittest to be done.
…...
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From whence it is obvious to conclude that, since our Faculties are not fitted to penetrate into the internal Fabrick and real Essences of Bodies; but yet plainly discover to us the Being of a GOD, and the Knowledge of our selves, enough to lead us into a full and clear discovery of our Duty, and great Concernment, it will become us, as rational Creatures, to imploy those Faculties we have about what they are most adapted to, and follow the direction of Nature, where it seems to point us out the way.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Edited by Peter Nidditch (1975), Book 4, Chapter 12, Section 11, 646.
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Gentlemen, as we study the universe we see everywhere the most tremendous manifestations of force. In our own experience we know of but one source of force, namely will. How then can we help regarding the forces we see in nature as due to the will of some omnipresent, omnipotent being? Gentlemen, there must be a GOD.
As quoted in W. E. Byerly (writing as a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, but a former student at a Peirce lecture on celestial mechanics), 'Benjamin Peirce: II. Reminiscences', The American Mathematical Monthly (Jan 1925), 32, No. 1, 6.
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Genuine religion has its root deep down in the heart of humanity and in the reality of things. It is not surprising that by our methods we fail to grasp it: the actions of the Deity make no appeal to any special sense, only a universal appeal; and our methods are, as we know, incompetent to detect complete uniformity. There is a principle of Relativity here, and unless we encounter flaw or jar or change, nothing in us responds; we are deaf and blind therefore to the Immanent Grandeur, unless we have insight enough to recognise in the woven fabric of existence, flowing steadily from the loom in an infinite progress towards perfection, the ever-growing garment of a transcendent God.
Continuity: The Presidential Address to the British Association (1913), 92-93.
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Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.
Attributed.
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Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that Man is the image of God.
Conversation with the Sidereal Messenger [an open letter to Galileo Galilei], Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo (1610), in Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke (1937- ), Vol. 4, 308, ll. 9-10.
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Geometry is unique and eternal, a reflection of the mind of God. That men are able to participate in it is one of the reasons why man is an image of God.
As quoted in Epilogue, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), 524, citing Letter (9 or 10 April 1599) to Herwart von Hohenburg.
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Geometry, which before the origin of things was coeternal with the divine mind and is God himself (for what could there be in God which would not be God himself?), supplied God with patterns for the creation of the world, and passed over to Man along with the image of God; and was not in fact taken in through the eyes.
Harmonice Mundi, The Harmony of the World (1619), book IV, ch. 1. Trans. E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan and J. V. Field (1997), 304.
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God [could] vary the laws of Nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe.
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God and the Doctor we alike adore
But only when in danger, not before;
The danger o’er, both are alike requited,
God is forgotten, and the Doctor slighted.
…...
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God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must accept it. The only choice is how.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 24
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God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.
…...
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God created man in his own image, says the Bible; the philosophers do the exact opposite, they create God in theirs.
Aphorism 48 in Notebook D (1773-1775), as translated by R.J. Hollingdale in Aphorisms (1990). Reprinted as The Waste Books (2000), 51.
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God created, Linnaeus ordered.
Quoting the witticism current in the late eighteenth century in 'The Two Faces of Linnaeus', in Tore Frängsmyr (ed.), Linnaeus: The Man and his Work (1983), 22.
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God does arithmetic.
Attributed. Quoted in A.L. Mackay, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991), 100.
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God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
Quoted, without citation, by Léopold Infeld in Quest (1942, 1980), 279. If you know the primary source, please contact Webmaster.
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God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
Written in his spiritual diary, published posthumously, Markings (1963), 56.
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God ever arithmetizes.
As quoted, without citation, in Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics (1937), Vol. 2, 21, and in Joseph Jastrow, The Story of Human Error (1936), 163. Both authors also compare the quote to Plato, “God ever geometrizes”.

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.
Given as “A. Weil has said…”, in Paul C. Rosenbloom, The Elements of Mathematical Logic (1950), 72. Note that Rosenbloom gives the quote in narrative form, not within quotation marks, which suggests these words may not be verbatim. Later texts have added quotation marks [which may not be justified. —Webmaster] As yet, Webmaster has not found an earlier source to validate whether the quotations marks can be used. (Can you help?)
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God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration! He who does not know truth at sight is unworthy of Her Notice.
Marginal note (c. 1808) written in his copy of 'Discourse VII', The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798), beside “…as true as mathematical demonstration…”. As given in William Blake, Edwin John Ellis (ed.) and William Butler Yeats (ed.), The Works of William Blake (1893), Vol. 2, 340.
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God gives every bird his food, but does not throw it into the nest.
Seen, for example, in 'Home and Foreign Gossip', Harpers Weekly: A Journal of Civilization (1869), 13, 187, identified with other examples as a "Danish proverb".
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God gives every bird his food, but he does not throw it into the nest.
As quoted, without citation, in John Walker, A Fork in the Road: Answers to Daily Dilemmas from the Teachings of Jesus Christ (2005), 99.
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God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.
…...
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God has no intention of setting a limit to the efforts of man to conquer space.
…...
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God has not revealed all things to man and has entrusted us with but a fragment of His mighty work. But He who directs all things, who has established and laid the foundation of the world, who has clothed Himself with Creation, He is greater and better than that which He has wrought. Hidden from our eyes, He can only be reached by the spirit.
From Quaestiones Naturales as translated in Charles Singer, From Magic to Science (1958), 57.
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God has ordered all his Creation by Weight and Measure.
Written over the door of the world's first instructional laboratory, founded at Giessen, 1824.
As given in Patterns of Survival: An Anatomy of Life (1938), 2. It is based on a line from the Bible in Wisdom of Solomon, Chap. 11, Verse 20. Webmaster presumes this is the English translation, but Liebig used the dictum written in German. Contact webmaster if you know the specific wording of the original.
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God having designed man for a sociable creature, furnished him with language, which was to be the great instrument and tie of society.
In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1849), Book 3, Chap 1, Sec. 1, 288.
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God heales, and the Physitian hath the thankes.
From Jacula Prudentum; or Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, &c. Selected by Mr. George Herbert (1651). In Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of George Herbert: Volume III, Prose (1874).

God healeth and the physician hath the thanks.
In John Ray, A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs (1678, 1818), 7.
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God heals, and the Doctor takes the Fees.
In Poor Richard's Almanack (1744). Note: q.v. John Ray, “God healeth and the physician hath the thanks.”
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God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel.
In a letter to Mr. Cunningham, 11 Jun 1791. Quoted in James Wood Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (1893), 126:18.
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God in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
'The Fly' (1942), Good Intentions (1943), 220.
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God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
In Our Cosmic Habitat (2003), Preface, ix. Written as a frivolous companion to the aphorism, “Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.”
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God is a child; and when he began to play, he cultivated mathematics. It is the most godly of man’s games.
Said by the fictional character, mathematics teacher, Professor Hirt, in Das Blinde Spiel (The Blind Game, 1954), 253. As translated in an epigraph, Stanley Gudder, A Mathematical Journey (1976), 269. From the original German, “Gott ist ein Kind, und als er zu spielen begann, trieb er Mathematik. Die Mathematik ist göttlichste Spielerei unter den Menschen”, as quoted in Herbert Meschkowski, Hundert Jahre Mengenlehre (1973), 119.
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God is a philosophical black hole—the point where reason breaks down.
In Quotations: Superultramodern Science and Philosophy (2005), 5.
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God is able to do more than man can understand.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 156
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God is dead not because He doesn’t exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn’t.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 30
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God is dead, ... And we have killed him.
…...
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God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
The Gay Science (1882), book 3, no. 125, trans. W. Kaufmann (1974), 181.
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God is in the details.
'On Restraint in Design', New York Herald Tribune (28 Jun 1959).
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God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.
Rabbit Redux. Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 144
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God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.
…...
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God is love… . We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 143
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God is the “I” of the universe.
In On Love & Psychological Exercises: With Some Aphorisms & Other Essays (1998), 52.
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God is the psyche of the universe.
In On Love & Psychological Exercises: With Some Aphorisms & Other Essays (1998), 54.
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God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
Mauvaises pensées et autres (1942). In Bill Swainson and Anne H. Soukhanov. Encarta Book of Quotations (2000), 951.
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God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.
Anonymous
This is not a statement made by Alfred Korzybski, although he quoted it and attributed it as "an old maxim" in the Introduction to the second edition of his book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1941, 4th ed. 1958), xxxvii. It is included here to provide a correction for readers who find it listed elsewhere as an original quote he made.
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God may have written just a few laws and grown tired. We do not know whether we are in a tidy universe or an untidy one.
How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), 49.
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God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
In 'News and Views: The Breakdown of Physics?', Nature (2 Oct 1975), 257, 362. [A reference to Albert Einstein’s earlier quote on dice].
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God pity the man of science who believes in nothing but what he can prove by scientific methods; for if ever a human being needed divine pity, he does.
Every-Day Topics, a Book of Briefs (1882), 5.
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God plays dice with the universe, but they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.
Quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), 314.
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God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), editted and translated by William Hastie in Kant's Cosmogony (1900), 27.
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God runs electromagnetics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday by the wave theory, and the devil runs it by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
In Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (1978), 159, citing interview by David Webster, AIP, p.35.
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God said, “Let the earth produce vegetation… . Let the earth produce every kind of living creature. …” God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts, and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth. “
Bible
(circa 725 B.C.)
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God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
In The Ghost in the Machine (1967), 339.
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God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
Quoted in Behram Kursunoglu and Eugene Paul Wigner, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1990), Preface, xv.
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God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works … you don't need him anymore. But … you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet.
Interview, collected in Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown (eds.) Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988), 208-209.
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God’s interest in the human race is nowhere better evinced than in obstetrics.
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God’s promises are like the stars; the darker the night the brighter they shine.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 153
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God's Registrar.
[Referring to Carolus Linnaeus, who is also known as Father of Taxonomy.]
Anonymous
In Heinz Goerke Linnaeus (1966) trans. by Denver Lindley (1973), 89, Title of Chapter 8.
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Gods are born and die, but the atom endures.
In Perspectives (1966). As quoted and cited in Epigraph, Jefferson Hane Weaver, The World of Physics: A Small Library of the Literature of Physics (1987), Vol. 2, 85.
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Gods are fragile things they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
In Garry Poole, Judson Poling, MS Debra Poling, Do Science and the Bible Conflict? (), 64.
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Great God, how can we possibly be always right and the others always wrong?
As quoted in Norman Hampson, Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution (1983), 11.
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Groves were God’s first Temples.
In 'A Forest Hymn', The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant (1853), 75.
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Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. “What inference,” asked the latter, “might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?” Haldane replied: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
As quoted in Clifton Fadiman (ed.), André Bernard (ed.), Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes (2000), 253.
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Happy is he who bears a god within himself, an ideal of beauty, and obeys him: an ideal of art, an ideal of the virtues of the Gospel. These are the living springs of great thoughts and great actions. All are illuminated by reflections of the sublime.
Speech (27 Apr 1882) on his reception into the Académie Française, as translated in Maurice Benjamin Strauss, Familiar Medical Quotations (1968), 490.
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He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator. For 'god' is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood is the lordship of God, not over his own body as is supposed by those for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. The supreme God is an eternal, infinite, and absolutely perfect being; but a being, however perfect, without dominion is not the Lord God.
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), 3rd edition (1726), trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (1999), General Scholium, 940-1.
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He that believes, without having any Reason for believing, may be in love with his own Fancies; but neither seeks Truth as he ought, nor pays the Obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those discerning Faculties he has given him, to keep him out of Mistake and Errour.
In 'Of Reason', Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690), Book 4, Ch. 17, Sec. 24, 347.
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He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god.
Plato
Quoted by Francis Bacon, in Novum Organum. As translated by Joseph Devey in The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon Including the Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum (1808), 491.
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He who does not believe that God is above all is either a fool or has no experience of life.
From the original Latin, “Deum qui non summum putet, Aut stultum aut rerum esse imperitum existumem,” in Incert. Fragment XV. As translated in Thomas Benfield Harbottle, Dictionary of Quotations (Classical) (1897), 44.
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He who has mastered the Darwinian theory, he who recognizes the slow and subtle process of evolution as the way in which God makes things come to pass, … sees that in the deadly struggle for existence that has raged throughout countless aeons of time, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in order to bring forth that last consummate specimen of God’s handiwork, the Human Soul
In The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of his Origin (1884), 32. Collected in Studies in Religion (1902), 19–20.
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He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science, or a young student at the University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor, or a maker of dramas like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza. or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.
In 'The Critic As Artist', Oscariana: Epigrams (1907), 27-28
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Here I am at the limit which God and nature has assigned to my individuality. I am compelled to depend upon word, language and image in the most precise sense, and am wholly unable to operate in any manner whatever with symbols and numbers which are easily intelligible to the most highly gifted minds.
In Letter to Naumann (1826), in Vogel, Goethe's Selbstzeugnisse (1903), 56.
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Herewith I offer you the Omnipotent Finger of God in the anatomy of a louse: wherein you will find miracles heaped on miracles and will see the wisdom of God clearly manifested in a minute point.
Letter to Melchisedec Thevenot (Apr 1678). In G. A. Lindeboom (ed.), The Letters of Jan Swammerdam to Melchisedec Thivenot (1975), 104-5.
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Hogwash! … On our way to the moon, and on the moon, I worked as hard as John Young and it took me another six years before I found out the truth about God. In the days of Apollo and long afterwards I still believed in the theory of evolution and rejected the Biblical creation story. [Commenting on an American reporter’s printed intimation that Lunar Module pilots “had less things to do and had time to look out the spaceship’s window, or to explore the surroundings. Afterwards they could not cope with what they had seen, felt and experienced.”]
As quoted in Colin Burgess, Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969-1975 (2010), 422. Burgess introduced the quote with: “Charles Moss Duke Jr. has always been wrongly labeled as the astronaut who found God during his Apollo 16 mission, but even though he did eventually become a born-again Christian, this life-altering epiphany came some years after the event.” Burgess explained that Duke dislikes “misinformed characterizations of himself and his Apollo colleagues and of the religious impact of his own lunar mission.” [The ellipsis in the subject quote spans from one paragraph to the next in Burgess’ book. The ellipsis was added by Webmaster, on the assumption that the word “Hogwash!” belongs with the statement in the following paragraph.]
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How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
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How could science be any enemy of religion when God commanded man to be a scientist the day He told him to rule the earth and subject it?
In The Life of All Living: the philosophy of life (1929, 1942), 212.
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How I hate the man who talks about the “brute creation”, with an ugly emphasis on Brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?
In W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919), 27-28.
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Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988), 8-9.
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I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.
In Thomas Mann: a Critical Study (1971), 175.
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I always love geology. In winter, particularly, it is pleasant to listen to theories about the great mountains one visited in the summer; or about the Flood or volcanoes; about great catastrophes or about blisters; above all about fossils … Everywhere there are hypotheses, but nowhere truths; many workmen, but no experts; priests, but no God. In these circumstances each man can bring his hypothesis like a candle to a burning altar, and on seeing his candle lit declare ‘Smoke for smoke, sir, mine is better than yours’. It is precisely for this reason that I love geology.
In Nouvelles Genevoises (1910), 306. First edition, 1841.
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I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.
In 'Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution', The American Biology Teacher (Mar 1973), 125-129.
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I am a sociologist, God help me.
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I am almost thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age—& remain like Swift's Stulbruggs—cut and dry for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures:—whereas, I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge.
In Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: the Life of a Wanderer (1969), 22.
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I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.
'Isaac Asimov on Science and the Bible'. In Sidney Hook, et. al. On the Barricades: Religion and Free Inquiry in Conflict (1989), 329.
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I am merely thinking God’s thoughts after him.
Attributed. Could be a boiled down version of a longer quote that includes: “God wanted us to … share in his own thoughts.” (Included here; it begins “Those laws [of nature] are…”) This capsulized version is widely seen linked with Kepler’s name, but never with a citation, for example, in Thomas Winthrop Coit, Inaugural Address Delivered in the Chapel of Morrison College (Nov 1835), 32. As far as Webmaster can determine, historians of science have not found any primary source in which Kepler himself expresses this idea in exactly these words. In a 2001 discussion group post, Ted Davis reported: “I know Kepler pretty well and have searched for it. I’ve also asked Owen Gingerich, who knows Kepler as well as anyone alive, and he can’t confirm it either.”
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Benjamin Banneker quote: I am of the African race, and in the colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye
I am of the African race, and in the colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
Letter to Thomas Jefferson included with a copy of Banneker’s first almanacs. In George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (1882), Vol. 1, 395.
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I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
Harmonice Mundi, The Harmony of the World (1619), end of Introduction to Book V. Trans. E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan and J. V. Field (1997), 391.
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I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.
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I believe in Darwin and God together.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 34
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I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
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I called it ignose, not knowing which carbohydrate it was. This name was turned down by my editor. 'God-nose' was not more successful, so in the end 'hexuronic acid' was agreed upon. To-day the substance is called 'ascorbic acid' and I will use this name.
Studies on Biological Oxidation and Some of its Catalysts (C4 Dicarboxylic Acids, Vitamin C and P Etc.) (1937), 73.
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I came to biochemistry through chemistry; I came to chemistry, partly by the labyrinthine routes that I have related, and partly through the youthful romantic notion that the natural sciences had something to do with nature. What I liked about chemistry was its clarity surrounded by darkness; what attracted me, slowly and hesitatingly, to biology was its darkness surrounded by the brightness of the givenness of nature, the holiness of life. And so I have always oscillated between the brightness of reality and the darkness of the unknowable. When Pascal speaks of God in hiding, Deus absconditus, we hear not only the profound existential thinker, but also the great searcher for the reality of the world. I consider this unquenchable resonance as the greatest gift that can be bestowed on a naturalist.
Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature (1978), 55.
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I cannot accept any concept of God based on the fear of life or the fear of death, or blind faith.
As recollected from a visit some months earlier, and quoted in William Miller, 'Old Man’s Advice to Youth: “Never Lose a Holy Curiosity”', Life (2 May 1955), 62.
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I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.
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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 egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.
From 'What I Believe: Living Philosophies XIII', Forum and Century (Oct 1930), 84, No. 4, 194. Article in full, reprinted in Edward H. Cotton (ed.), Has Science Discovered God? A Symposium of Modern Scientific Opinion (1931), 97.
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I confess that Magic teacheth many superfluous things, and curious prodigies for ostentation; leave them as empty things, yet be not ignorant of their causes. But those things which are for the profit of men—for the turning away of evil events, for the destroying of sorceries, for the curing of diseases, for the exterminating of phantasms, for the preserving of life, honor, or fortune—may be done without offense to God or injury to religion, because they are, as profitable, so necessary.
In De Occulta Philosophia (1533), Vol. 1. Translation by J.F. (1651) reprinted as The Philosophy of Natural Magic (1913), 28.
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I could almost wish, at this point, that I were in the habit of expressing myself in theological terms, for if I were, I might be able to compress my entire thesis into a sentence. All knowledge of every variety (I might say) is in the mind of God—and the human intellect, even the best, in trying to pluck it forth can but “see through a glass, darkly.”
In Asimov on Physics (1976), 146. Also in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 279.
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I could not possibly be of such a nature as I am, and yet have in my mind the idea of a God, if God did not in reality exist.
In Meditations (1641), Part 3. English as given in John Veitch (trans.), 'Of God: That He Exists', Meditation III, The Method, Meditations, and Selections from the Principles of Descartes (1880), 132. Also seen translated as, “It is not possible that I could have in myself the idea of God, if God did not truly exist.”
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I do not believe that God ever created a man and then got so “put out” over the job that He damned him.
Aphorism in The Philistine (Apr 1905), 20, No. 5, 160.
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I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom on which God weaves the universe.
In The Loom of God: Tapestries of Mathematics and Mysticism (1997, 2009), Introduction, 10.
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I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.
'Reply to Lewis Edwin Hahn', The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (1980), 901.
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I don’t believe in evolution, like people believe in God … Science and technology are not advanced by people who believe, but by people who don’t know but are doing their best to find out.
With co-author Jack Cohen. In Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Chap. 4, 'Science and Magic', The Science of Discworld (1999), 36-37. Pratchett wrote the fantasy story told in the odd-numbered chapters. Following each, relevant real science is provided by his co-authors, Stewart and Cohen, in the even-numbered chapters (such as Chap. 4), but which of the two wrote which lines, is not designated. For the subject quote, the wider context suggests co-author Jack Cohen was relating his own experience.
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I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 154
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I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.
As quoted in John Noble Wilford, 'Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest', New York Times (12 Mar 1991), C10.
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I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, then that this universall Frame, is without a Minde. And therefore, God never wrought Miracle, to convince Atheisme, because his Ordinary Works Convince it. It is true, that a little Philosophy inclineth Mans Minde to Atheisme; But depth in Philosophy, bringeth Mens Mindes about to Religion.
'Of Atheisme' (1625) in James Spedding, Robert Ellis and Douglas Heath (eds.), The Works of Francis Bacon (1887-1901), Vol. 6, 413.
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I hate science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock-scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.
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I have always played with the fancy that some contagion from outer space had been the seed of man. Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
Commenting on the first moon landing. In 'Reactions to Man’s Landing on the Moon Show Broad Variations in Opinions', The New York Times (21 Jul 1969), 6.
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I have declared infinite worlds to exist beside this our earth. It would not be worthy of God to manifest Himself in less than an infinite universe.
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I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.
Told to Valentine Bargmann.
Quoted in J. Sayen, Einstein in America (1958), 51.
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 Ptolemy quote When I trace at my pleasure the windings
Conjunction of the moon, Venus and Jupiter (source)
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia, food of the gods.
Ptolemy
Epigram. Almagest. In Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (1993), 4.
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I love nuclear energy. I just want to make sure it stays where God put it—93 million miles away, in the sun.
In article, interview with Anne Underwood, 'Designing For The Future', Newsweek (15 May 2005).
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I now think the answer is very simple: it’s true. God did create the universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and of necessity has involved Himself with His creation ever since. The purpose of this universe is something that only God knows for sure, but it is increasingly clear to modern science that the universe was exquisitely fine-tuned to enable human life.
In Letter (May 2005), sent to the Hope College 2005 Alumni Banquet, read in lieu of accepting an award in person, because of declining health from cancer.
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I often get letters … from people who say … I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. … I reply … “Well, it’s funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things … orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses.” But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he’s five years old. And I … say, “Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well,” and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.
From BBC TV, Life on Air (2002).
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I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
Letter (1958) to Mr Major. Collected in Dear Bertrand Russell: A Selection of his Correspondence with the General Public, 1950 - 1968 (1969), 41-42.
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I pray every day and I think everybody should. I don’t think you can be up here and look out the window as I did the first day and look out at the Earth from this vantage point. We’re not so high compared to people who went to the moon and back. But to look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is, to me, impossible. It just strengthens my faith.
From NASA transcript of News Conference by downlink from Space Shuttle Discovery during its STS-95 Mission in Earth orbit (5 Nov 1998). In response to question from Paul Hoveston of USA Today asking John Glenn about how the space flight strengthened his faith and if he had any time to pray in orbit.
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I prefer a God who once and for all impressed his will upon creation, to one who continually busied about modifying what he had already done.
Attributed. As stated in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 575.
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I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.
In Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov (ed.), It's Been a Good Life (2002), 21. Attribution uncertain. If you know an original print citation, please contact Webmaster.
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I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, “Man, if that’s not a definition of God, I don’t know what is.”
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 33
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I sometimes hear preachers speak of the sad condition of men who live without God in the world, but a scientist who lives without God in the world seems to me worse off than ordinary men.
As quoted in E.P. Whipple, 'Recollections of Agassiz', in Henry Mills Alden (ed.), Harper's New Monthly Magazine (June 1879), 59, 103.
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I thank God that I was not made a dexterous manipulator, for the most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.
In Joseph William Mellor, Modern Inorganic Chemistry (1927). Quoted earlier in books by Samuel Smiles.
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Thomas Robert Malthus quote Food is necessary to…existence
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I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature; and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they are now, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe; and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.
First 'Essay on the Principle of Population' (1798), reprinted in Parallel Chapters from the First and Second editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1895), 6.
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I think it’s time we recognized the Dark Ages are over. Galileo and Copernicus have been proven right. The world is in fact round; the Earth does revolve around the sun. I believe God gave us intellect to differentiate between imprisoning dogma and sound ethical science, which is what we must do here today.
Debating federal funding for stem cell research as Republican Representative (CT).
In Eve Herold, George Daley, Stem Cell Wars (2007), 57.
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I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Trees and Other Poems (1914), 19.
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I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don’t know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 142
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I undertake my scientific research with the confident assumption that the earth follows the laws of nature which God established at creation. … My studies are performed with the confidence that God will not capriciously confound scientific results by “slipping in” a miracle.
Quoted in Lenny Flank, Deception by Design: The Intelligent Design Movement in America (2007), 81. Also seen as cited from Arthur Newell Strahler, Science and Earth History: the Evolution/Creation Controversy (1987), 40-41.
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I walked on the moon, but walking with God is a lot more exciting.
Reflecting on becoming a born-again Christian (some years after his return from the Moon). As quoted in Colin Burgess, Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969-1975 (2010), 423.
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I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.
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I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.
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I will build a motor car for the great multitude … constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise … so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one—and enjoy with his family the blessing of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.
(1909). In My Life and Work (1922), 73.
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I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God—a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge—adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.
As quoted in E.P. Whipple, 'Recollections of Agassiz', in Henry Mills Alden (ed.), Harper's New Monthly Magazine (June 1879), 59, 103.
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I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.
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I would have my son mind and understand business, read little history, study the mathematics and cosmography; these are good, with subordination to the things of God. … These fit for public services for which man is born.
In Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1899), Vol. 1, 371.
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I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that He was indifferent.
In Impressions et Souvenirs (1896).
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I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, of Florence, aged seventy years, being brought personally to judgment, and kneeling before your Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lords Cardinals, General Inquisitors of the universal Christian republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands, swear that I have always believed, and now believe, and with the help of God will in future believe, every article which the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome holds, teaches, and preaches. But because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office altogether to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the sun is the centre and immovable, and forbidden to hold, defend, or teach the said false doctrine in any manner, and after it hath been signified to me that the said doctrine is repugnant with the Holy Scripture, I have written and printed a book, in which I treat of the same doctrine now condemned, and adduce reasons with great force in support of the same, without giving any solution, and therefore have been judged grievously suspected of heresy; that is to say, that I held and believed that the sun is the centre of the universe and is immovable, and that the earth is not the centre and is movable; willing, therefore, to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of every Catholic Christian, this vehement suspicion rightfully entertained toward me, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect contrary to Holy Church; and I swear that I will never more in future say or assert anything verbally, or in writing, which may give rise to a similar suspicion of me; but if I shall know any heretic, or anyone suspected of heresy, that I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be; I swear, moreover, and promise, that I will fulfil and observe fully, all the penances which have been or shall be laid on me by this Holy Office. But if it shall happen that I violate any of my said promises, oaths, and protestations (which God avert!), I subject myself to all the pains and punishments which have been decreed and promulgated by the sacred canons, and other general and particular constitutions, against delinquents of this description. So may God help me, and his Holy Gospels which I touch with my own hands. I, the above-named Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above, and in witness thereof with my own hand have subscribed this present writing of my abjuration, which I have recited word for word. At Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, June 22, 1633. I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above with my own hand.
Abjuration, 22 Jun 1633. In J.J. Fahie, Galileo, His Life and Work (1903), 319-321.
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