Elias Canetti Quotes

we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours.

Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are.

If there is a God, his plan is very similar to someone not having a plan.

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don't know how I would make that make sense in the universe.

I believe that there may well be a personal God out there - not a monotheistic God - that has got it in for me.

Some people turn from God because they cannot understand how a good God can permit evil in the world.

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

The first thing that we need to say is that God is grieving, too. Uh, a lot of people try to make it sound like 'well everything that happens is God's will.' That's nonsense. God allows everything, but God does not choose everything.

'Preacher' - what it's saying is not just blasphemy and good, fun violence. It's asking, 'Where is God?' If he is there, what's he doing?

Results like these [state of the earth] do not belong on the resumé of a supreme being.

If the whole world is evil, then the tragedy that befell you is justified," she went on. "That would make it easier for you to accept the deaths of your wife and daughters. But if good people do exist, then, however much you deny it, your life will be unbearable; because fate set a trap for you, and you know you didn't deserve it. It isn't the light you want to recover, it's the certainty that there is only darkness.

In the aftermath of the recent wave action in the Indian Ocean, even the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williamson [sic], proved himself a latter-day Voltairean by whimpering that he could see how this might shake belief in a friendly creator. Williamson is of course a notorious fool, who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep, but even so, one is forced to rub one's eyes in astonishment. Is it possible that a grown man could live so long and still have his personal composure, not to mention his lifetime job description, upset by a large ripple of seawater?

Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen. He either permits it to happen, or He brings it about Himself.

All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off.

The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so, cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, than they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

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

If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, "As unhappy as God."

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.