Herman Melville Quotes

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

The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study. God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

I think any apparent contradiction in scripture is my limited capacity. Me trying to understand God is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. I don't have the brain capacity.

When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man's limited powers of comprehension. God, as He really is, is far beyond man's imagination, let alone understanding. God has revealed only so much of Himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear.

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

I do not think a philosopher who would apply himself so earnestly to the explaining the ultimate principles of the soul, would show himself a great master in the very science of human nature, which he pretends to explain, or very knowing in what is naturally satisfactory to the mind of man.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike.

We have nothing now between us, save - respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies.

The nature of evil, the nature of it, it exists. It exists and I think within us we have the tools. If we have the will, we can combat it. I think the power is within us and it lies in our own conceptualization of God and positivity and compassion and love.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.

God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.

Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways.

The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can't be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.

After a few days in hospital, I was thinking, Oh, gee - I raised in a church, Protestant upbringing which I'd rejected as an adult - I'm lying in bed thinking, Hmmm, maybe I ought to pray. They always say there are no atheists in a foxhole... and I thought, Here I am in a pretty good-sized foxhole... and I thought Naahhh. I wouldn't respect any God who would listen to me after I'd rejected him so vociferously.

Which was first, Matter or Force? If we think on this question, we shall find that we are unable to conceive of matter without force, or force without matter. When God created the elements of which the earth is composed, He created certain wondrous forces, which are set free and become evident when matter acts on matter.

There is much in Christianity which can be subjected to exact analysis. But the ultimate things are shrouded in the silent mysteries of God.

Modern man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no mean of proving immortality), why should we bother with evidence?

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.

Wisdom lies in thinking. The spear-head of thinking is rationalism.

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

To reflect on the essence of the Creator ... is forbidden to the human intellect because of the severance of all relation between the two existences.

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

I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.

In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).