Aiden Wilson Tozer Quotes

If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

On the spiritual theory, man consists essentially of a spiritual nature or mind intimately associated with a spiritual body or soul, both of which are developed in and by means of a material organism.

God should not be called an individual substance, since the principal of individuation is matter.

Is God a man with two arms and legs like me? Does He have eyes, a head? Does He have bowels? Well I do, and that makes me more wonderful than He is!

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.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.

Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought.

Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.

What the mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me.

God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

God is a reality of spirit He cannot be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.

Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.

The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.

It is said that God has created man in his own image. But it may be that humankind has created God in the image of humankind.

The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God.

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.

We offer up prayers to god only because we have made him after our own image. We treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.

We talk about God as though he was like a somebody. We ask him to bless our nation, or save our Queen, or give us a fine day for the picnic. And we actually expect him to be on our side in an election or war even though our opponents are also God's children.