Martin Niemoller Quotes

I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.

You will never understand who you are until you understand who God is.

God’s purposes are not for me to understand His plans: His plan is for me to understand Who He is.

Instead of asking what it feels like to follow God or be used by God, we should be asking who God is, and whether we really know Him. Everything else will take care of itself.

If it's possible to have an enemy without making it personal or moral, then that's what I'm trying to do.

After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

Always the most revealing thing about the church is her idea of God.

God will cease to be God, if he brought into being a single person with the hall-mark of inferiority.

We are all born idolaters, and idolatry is good, because it is in the nature of man. Who can get beyond it? Only the perfect man, the God-man. The rest are all idolaters. So long as we see this universe before us, with its forms and shapes, we are all idolaters. This is a gigantic symbol we are worshipping. He who says he is the body is a born idolater.

If we had a better understanding of the ways we think about enemies, we might be able to think of more rational ways of settling conflict.

An enemy might at any time become a friend, but while an enemy was an enemy he should be trodden on and persecuted.

It is mostly a matter of wills. Whose will is going to break first? Ours or the enemy's?

Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are.

Certainly it does make the greatest possible difference what we think about God; the knowledge of God is the very basis of religion.

How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.

People need an enemy to feel a sense of purpose.

I don't think God is a gender. He presents himself as a father but he comes to us with the tenderness of a mother. In some of the parables, he is the housewife who cleans the house looking for the lost coin. So I think we can miss the point if we get too concerned about the gender of God.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.

According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptableso that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch--an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still "like us.

A loving God who has no wrath is no God. He is an idol of our own making as much as if we carved Him out of stone.

But his Lordship [tells]us that God is wholly here, and wholly there, and wholly every where; because he has no parts. I cannot comprehend nor conceive this. For methinks it implies also that the whole world is also in the whole God, and in every part of God. Norcan I find anything of this in the Scripture. If I could find it there, I could believe it; and if I could find it in the public doctrine of the Church, I could easily abstain from contradicting it.

If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.

Disarmed, I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.