John A. Powell Quotes

We are all born with a belief in God. It may not have a name or face. We may not even see it as God. But it is there. It is the sense that comes over us as we stare into the starlit sky, or watch the last fiery rays of an evening sunset. It is the morning shiver as we wake on a beautiful day and smell a richness in the air that we know and love from somewhere we can't quite recall. It is the mystery behind the beginning of time and beyond the limits of space. It is a sense of otherness that brings alive something deep in our hearts.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig--or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery.

Larry, you only told me one lie. You said there will be another Larry Bird. Larry, there will never, ever be another Larry Bird.

religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.

We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.

Coerced innocence is like an imprisoned lark,--open the door, and it is off forever. The bird that roams through the sky and the groves unrestrained knows how to dodge the hawk and protect itself; but the caged one, the moment it leaves its bars and bolts behind, is pounced upon by the fowler or the vulture.

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments.

I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.

We faintly hear, we dimly see, In differing phrase we pray; But dim or clear, we own in Him The life, the truth, the way.

I have never been happier, more exhilarated, at peace, rested, inspired, and aware of the grandeur of the universe and the greatness of God than when I find myself in a natural setting not much changed from the way He made it.

Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.

And as a bird each fond endearment tries To tempt its new-fledg'd offspring to the skies, He tried each art, reprov'd each dull delay, Allur'd to brighter worlds, and led the way.

You could not see a cloud, because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead - There were no birds to fly.

Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.

I don't think that God is a person, a great big person in the sky. I think that God is the essence of life that shapes and forms itself in a thousand different ways, in a million lifetimes, that can be used and focused, and directed and experienced.

In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.

...If there’s a God, there are plenty of people who know where he is.” I shrugged, still watching the sky. ... “I just want to know that he’s there, so that I can die knowing there’s going to be someone I can punch in the mouth on the other end.

We who love Him beheld Him with these our eyes which He made to see; and we touched Him with these our hands which He taught to reach forth.

Gratitude to the Great Sky who holds billions of stars - and goes yet beyond that - beyond all powers, and thoughts and yet is within us - Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky.

Eagles fly where lesser birds cannot fly, so eagles can do what lesser birds cannot do.

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.