John Wesley Quotes

What is divine? Simply that which man has not yet been able to understand. Once understood, it ceases to be divine.

Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities.

The proud intellectual seeks knowledge about God, but he never knows God, because he cannot accept the mysteries that he is unable to fully comprehend.

Let's worship Divinity, but understand the divinity we worship is beyond our comprehension.

God may be a human creation, but He goes His way, not ours.

Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. What a stunted, insignificant god that would be! If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep-dependent lives.

If God is vast and boundless as the ocean, how can a tiny drop like man imagine what He is?

If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.

If God was small enough for you to completely understand him, he wouldn't be big enough for you to completely trust him.

It is a presumption on the part of man when he demands in words an explanation of God.

A cockle-fish may as soon crowd the ocean into its narrow shell, as vain man ever comprehend the decrees of God!

The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans--in pure principle--we do not and never will know all the principles

Reason refuseth its homage to a God who can be fully understood.

Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.

Can he who understands not God's word, understand God's works?

The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.

The Buddhists have a story about blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's various parts, and each describes the elephant according to the part he touched. That is the way we can hope to know God.

We have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only when we set out to discover "the secret of God" that our difficulties disappear.

Reality, truth, and Jesus Christ are incredibly open-ended

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often that’s what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.

If you understood him, it would not be God.

The goodness of God is infinitely more wonderful than we will ever be able to comprehend.

God is able to do more than man can understand.

God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission.