CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There's no such thing as chance;
And what to us seems merest accident
Springs from the deepest source of destiny.

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
Wallensteins Tod (The Death of Wallenstein) [1798],
actII, sc. iii


Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below?

Charles Lamb
On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born [1827]


'Tis all a Checkerboard of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

Edward FitzGerald
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,
st. 49 [first edition]


The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world . . . we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill
Radio broadcast to America on receiving the honorary degree of
Doctor of Laws from the University of Rochester, New York
[June 16, 1941]


Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

Jean Paul Sartre
L'[Ecirc ]tre et le Neant
(Being and Nothingness) [1943]


Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to a humble and grateful mind.

Epictetus
Discourses, bk.I, ch.16


Hail to you gods . . .
On that day of the great reckoning.
Behold me, I have come to you,
Without sin, without guilt, without evil,
Without a witness against me,
Without one whom I have wronged. . . .
Rescue me, protect me,
Do not accuse me before the great god!
I am one pure of mouth, pure of hands.

The Book of the Dead
The Address to the Gods


Creator uncreated.
Sole one, unique one, who traverses eternity,
Remote one, with millions under his care;
Your splendor is like heaven's splendor.

Suti and Hor
First Hymn to the Sun God


I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.

The Holy Bible, The Old Testament
Job Chapter 19, Verse 25-26


As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.

The Holy Bible, The Old Testament
Psalms Chapter 42, Verse 1-2


The kingdom of God is within you.

The Holy Bible, The New Testament
St. Luke Chapter 17, Verse 21


God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

The Holy Bible, The New Testament
St. John Chapter 3, Verse 16


Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

The Holy Bible, The New Testament
St. John Chapter 14, Verse 1-2


What is God? Everything.

Pindar
Fragment 140d


Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away. . . . A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.

Plato
Dialogues, Phaedo, 1 sec.62


Will you not allow that I have as much of the spirit of prophecy in me as the swans? For they, when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more lustily than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are going to the god they serve.

Plato
Dialogues, Phaedo, 1 sec.85


Is the dwelling place of God anywhere but in the earth and sea, the air and sky, and virtue? Why seek we further for deities? Whatever you see, whatever you touch, that is Jupiter.

Lucan
The Civil War, bk.IX,578


As for the unbelievers, their works are as a mirage in a spacious plain which the man athirst supposes to be water, till, when he comes to it, he finds it is nothing; there indeed he finds God, and He pays him his account in full; and God is swift at the reckoning. Or they are as shadows upon a sea obscure, covered by a billow above which is a billow, above which are clouds, shadows piled upon one another; when he puts forth his hand, wellnigh he cannot see it. And to whomsoever God assigns no light, no light has he.

The Koran


We [God] created Man, and We know what his soul whispereth within him; and We are nearer unto him than his jugular vein.

The Koran


O God! that one might read the book of fate.

William Shakespeare
King Henry the Fourth, Part II
[1597-1598], Act: III, Scene: i, Line: 45


A man can die but once; we owe God a death.

William Shakespeare
King Henry the Fourth, Part II
[1597-1598], Act: III, Scene: ii, Line: 253


What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!

William Shakespeare
Hamlet
[1600-1601], Act: II, Scene: ii, Line: 317


Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men;
Unless there be who think not God at all.

John Milton
Samson Agonistes [1671],l. 293


"The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob," not of philosophers and scholars.

Blaise Pascal
Writing found in Pascal's effects after his death


God lives not without me.
I know that without me God cannot live at all;
Were I to go, he also to his death must fall.

Angelus Silesius
The Cherubic Wanderer [1657-1675]


I am like God, and God like me.
I am as large as God, he is as small as I:
He cannot above me, nor I beneath him be.

Angelus Silesius
The Cherubic Wanderer [1657-1675]


If God were not a necessary Being of Himself, He might almost seem to be made for the use and benefit of men.

John Tillotson
Sermon


God and all the attributes of God are eternal.

Benedict Baruch Spinoza
Ethics [1677],
pt.I, proposition 19


God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them.

Sir Isaac Newton
Optics [1704]


By night an atheist half believes a God.

Edward Young
Night Thoughts [1742-1745].
Night V,l. 177


Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heav'n.

Alexander Pope
An Essay on Man [1733-1734]. Epistle I,l. 99


If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Voltaire Francois Marie Arouet
Epicirctre a l'Auteur du Livre des
Trois Imposteurs [November 10, 1770]


I shall always maintain that whoso says in his heart, "There is no God," while he takes the name of God upon his lips, is either a liar or a madman.

Jean Jacques Rousseau
Emile; ou, De l'Education [1762],I


Oh! for a closer walk with God.

William Cowper
Olney Hymns [1779],
1 no.1


I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

Thomas Paine
The Age of Reason [1793], pt.I


Am I a god? I see so clearly!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust [1808-1832]. The First Part.
Night, Faust in His Study


The universe is the language of God.

Lorenz Oken
Elements of Physiophilosophy [1847],
pt. I, par. 64


Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.

Alphonse de Lamartine
Meditations Poetiques [1820]. Sermon 2


To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay
On Lord Bacon [1837]


You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journal, October 1842


Standing on the bare ground . . . all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature [1836], sec.1


I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that He was indifferent.

George Sand
Impressions et Souvenirs [1896]


I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!-and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnets from the Portuguese [1850], no.43


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.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Flower in the Crannied Wall [1869]


What I call God,
And fools call Nature.

Robert Browning
The Ring and the Book [1868-1869],
bk.X, The Pope, l. 1073


Ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject.

Henry David Thoreau
Walden [1854],6, Visitors


All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

Cecil Frances Alexander
All Things Bright and Beautiful [1848], st. 1


I never saw a Moor-
I never saw the Sea-
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be.

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven-
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Checks were given-

Emily Dickinson
No. 1052 [c. 1865]


The contract 'twixt Hannah, God and me,
Was not for one or twenty years, but for eternity.

Petroleum V. Nasby
Hannah Jane [1871], st. 29


We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience [1902].
Lecture 3


I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

William James


God forbid that I should go to any heaven in which there are no horses.

Robert Bontine Cunninghame-Graham
Letter to Theodore Roosevelt [1917]


At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

Sigmund Freud
Complete Psychological Works.
Totem and Taboo [1912-1913]


I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

Clarence Seward Darrow
Speech at Toronto [1930]


And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely-
I'll make me a world."

James Weldon Johnson
God's Trombones [1927].
The Creation, st. 1


I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

Albert Einstein
From Philipp Frank,
Einstein, His Life and Times [1947]


Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Joyce Kilmer
Trees [1913]


All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

T homas S tearns Eliot
The Rock [1934], I


Gabriel: How about cleanin' up de whole mess of 'em and sta'tin' all over ag'in wid some new kind of animal?

God: An' admit I'm licked?

Marcus Cook Connelly
The Green Pastures [1930]


Poor, dear God. Playing Idiot's Delight. The game that never means anything, and never ends.

Robert E mmet Sherwood
Idiot's Delight [1936]


Where it will all end, knows God!

Wolcott Gibbs
More in Sorrow [1958].
Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce


And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know.
God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson,
Heaven holds a place for those who pray.

Paul Simon
Mrs. Robinson [1968]


In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.

Anonymous, North American Indian
Proverb (Northern Paiute)


Seek not, my soul, the life of the immortals; but enjoy to the full the resources that are within thy reach.

Pindar
Pythian Odes,III, l. 109


Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. . . . Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is to gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

Plato
Dialogues, Apology, sec.40


The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey thither.

Plato
Dialogues, Phaedo, 1 sec.107


Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Plato
The Republic, bk.VII,529


This embodied [soul] is eternally unslayable
In the body of everyone, son of Bharata;
Therefore all beings
Thou shouldst not mourn.
Likewise having regard for thine own [caste] duty
Thou shouldst not tremble;
For another, better thing than a fight required of duty
Exists not for a warrior.

Bhagavad Gita


All quotations in this chapter are from:
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Copyright (c) 1937, 1948, 1955, 1965, 1968, 1980
Little, Brown and Co.
All Rights Reserved.

Chapter Fifteen

Contents