The consciousness of God is simple and accessible to all. The knowledge of him is accessible to no one.
A sensible, modest person with a developed but limited intellect can sense his limits and stays within them, and within these limits he finds a notion of his soul and his Creator, comprehending the impossibility of taking this notion to complete clarity and being able to behold it as only a pure spirit could. He obediently stops before them and does not touch the veil, being content with the knowledge that he is standing before an Exalted Being. Philosophy is only useful and necessary before this boundary. What lies beyond are idle abstractions, unnatural to a human being, from which a sensible man refrains, and which are alien to the man of the masses.
All the nations of the world know and honor God; although each one vests him in their own way, under all these vestments it is still the same God.
A select minority with a higher need for learning, unsatisfied by simple common sense, searches for a more abstract God. I do not judge these people. But it is not right for this minority, speaking for the whole of humankind, to claim that God is hidden from the people because they themselves cannot see him. I accept that it may happen that people’s clever tricks can, for a time, convince the majority that there is no God, but this trend cannot last. One way or another, a human being will always need God. If, contrary to the law of nature, Divinity was revealed to us in a way that is even more apparent, I am convinced that people who are averse to God would come up with new ways of denying him. Reason always obeys the demands of the heart.
— Rousseau
Of all the things in the world, what I find least doubtful is my consciousness of being in the present.
The belief in God is as essential to human nature as his ability to walk on two legs; in some people this belief can change forms and even completely fade, but, as a general rule, it exists and is necessary for living wisely.
— After Lichtenberg
Whether or not God exists, whether or not there is a soul in the body, whether or not the world was created—all these propositions are equally impossible to fathom.
— Pascal
Religion comes from God, theology from the people.
— d’Escherny
Live in God, live with God, being conscious that he is within you, and do not try to define him with words.
