Samuel Butler Quotes

Because we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how He is but only how He is not.

You may know God, but not comprehend Him.

God is best known in not knowing him.

One cannot comprehend Him through reason, even if one reasoned for ages.

God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.

For whatever be the knowledge which we are able to obtain of God, either by perception or reflection, we must of necessity believe that He is by many degrees far better than what we perceive Him to be.

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

The infinite God can not by us, in the present limitation of our faculties, be comprehended or conceived.

No creature, not even the most exalted angel, can understand God or have perfect knowledge of Him.

Being God would be the ultimate.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

The problem with God is that we want him to reveal Himself, and He doesn't. We will never understand God.

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

A comprehended god is no god.

I believe that the question of the existence of God is an impenetrable mystery and beyond human comprehension.

If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

If God be an infinite being, there cannot be, either in the present or future world, any relative proportion between man and his God. Thus, the idea of God can never enter the human mind.

God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole Him.

God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially, for virtue cannot subsist without substance.

In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we're off track.

What I love about believing in a living God is that I believe God is constantly revealing God's self to us over time, and with each succeeding generation, we come a little closer to understanding the mind of God.