25 Of Our Favorite Quotes About God From Great Minds
Photo by Antropologo En Ruta
Our Creator desires us to know Him. He designed us to reach for Him, to draw near to Him, to pursue a relationship with Him. And so, we read our bibles, attend church, and pray, hoping to cultivate a robust faith and discover deeper truths about God.
And yet, God remains mysterious. There are endless questions to ponder about His nature, countless concepts to explore about who God truly is.
It’s a noble pursuit to dive into these topics on our own, but it’s also wise to seek input from great minds of the past — thinkers, saints, theologians, authors, poets, and philosophers whose ideas about God can help shed light as we each strive for a fuller understanding of Him.
Below, we’ve gathered some of our favorite quotes about God from some of the greatest, most inspiring, faith-filled minds.
01 | Mother Teresa
“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
02 | C. S. Lewis
“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”
03 | Julian of Norwich
“Everything that is good is God; whatever goodness we experience in this life is truly a taste of God, for it is God.”
04 | J. R. R. Tolkien
“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.”
05 | Joan of Arc
“It is better to be alone with God. His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die.”
06 | Henri Nouwen
“Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”
07 | Saint Teresa of Avila
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
08 | Frederick Buechner
“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”
09 | Maya Angelou
“God loves me. It still humbles me that this force that makes leaves and fleas and stars and rivers and you, loves me. Me, Maya Angelou. It’s amazing. I can do anything. And do it well. Any good thing, I can do it. That’s why I am who I am, yes, because God loves me and I’m amazed at it. I’m grateful for it.”
10 | Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
“Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, or even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them.”
11 | Corrie ten Boom
“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”
12 | Saint Hildegard of Bingen
“For eternity is called the ‘Father,’ the Word is called the ‘Son,’ and the breath that binds both of them together is called the ‘Holy Spirit.’”
13 | John Lennox
“You, as a human being, bear the image of God. The starry heavens show the glory of God, yes; but they are not made in God’s image. You are. That makes you unique. It gives you incalculable value. The galaxies are unimaginably large compared with you. However, you know that they exist, but they don’t know that you exist. You are more significant, therefore, than a galaxy.”
14 | Saint John of the Cross
“In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human success, but rather on how much we have loved.”
15 | Søren Kierkegaard
“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful, you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.”
16 | Martin Luther King Jr.
“The God that we worship is not a weak God, He is not an incompetent God and consequently he is able to beat back gigantic mountains of opposition and to bring low prodigious hill tops of evil. The ringing cry of the Christian faith is that our God is able.”
17 | Hans Urs von Balthasar
“What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”
18 | Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”
19 | Madeleine L’Engle
“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.”
20 | Harriet Tubman
“God’s time is always near. He gave me my strength and he set the North Star in the heavens; He meant I should be free.”
21 | G. K. Chesterton
“God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.”
22 | Dorothy Sayers
“What do we find God ‘doing about’ this business of sin and evil? … God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.”
23 | Eugene Peterson
“The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God’s creative genius is endless.”
24 | George MacDonald
“I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.”
25 | Mary Oliver
“Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”