October 7

You can avoid using the word God, but you cannot deny his existence. Nothing can exist without God.

1

All that I know, I know only because God exists, and I know him.

This is the only firm foundation for your relationship with people, with yourself, and with life beyond the earth and beyond time. Not only do I not find this mystical, I find the contrary view to be mysticism, and I think this reality is easiest for all to grasp and understand. To the question: what is God? I answer thus: God is the infinite, everything that I perceive myself a part of.

For me, God is what I aspire to, the striving towards which constitutes my life, and which therefore exists for me; but it is certainly something that I cannot understand and cannot name. If I were to fathom him, I would have reached him, and I would have nothing to strive for and there would be no life.

I cannot fathom or name him, but at the same time I know him, I know the direction towards him, which, of all my knowledge, is the most definitive. I am always afraid when I am without him; I am not afraid only when I am with him.

2

Religious actions motivated by selfish aims, such as prayers for rain or sacrifices made to gain rewards in the next world, are always greedy, and only the deed that follows your having perceived God is worthy of him.

Recognizing the highest reason in all creatures and things, the true believer sacrifices his own mind, directing it towards the spirit of God, and moves closer to the nature of the One who illuminates with his own light.

Let everyone carefully observe nature, both the seen and the unseen, as something that exists within the divine mind, because, beholding the infinite world within the divine mind, one can no longer yield to evil thoughts.

— Manusmriti

3

When I speak to you about God, do not imagine that I am talking to you about some object made of gold or silver. You can feel within your own soul the God I speak about. You carry him within yourself, and with your unclean thoughts and repulsive deeds you defile his image in your soul. You are careful not to do something indecent before a golden idol, which you take for a god, but you do not even blush when you yield to your vile thoughts and deeds before the face of the all-seeing and all-hearing God that dwells within you.

If only we could always remember that the God within us is witness to everything that we do and think, then we would stop sinning, and God would always stay with us. So let us remember God, let us think and talk of him as often as possible.

— Epictetus

4

God is not an idol, which must be worshipped and flattered, God is the ideal which a human being must realize in his everyday life.

— Lucy Mallory

5

It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know whom I mean.

— Thoreau

6

Never go to God on purpose: “Let me go to God, I’ll start living devoutly. I was living like a devil, why not try a godly life now, it can’t hurt…” It will hurt a great deal. Like getting married, you should go to God only when you would be glad not to go and glad not to get married, but cannot… Now, I am not going to tell people to yield to temptations, but if someone asks me: “Would I really not lose out by going to God rather than the devil?” I will scream at the top of my lungs: “Go, go to the devil, by all means go to the devil!” It is a hundred times better to get a good scorching by the devil than to stand at the crossroads or to go to God insincerely.

7

Even if a human being does not know that he is breathing air, he knows that he is deprived of something when he is suffocating. It is the same with a human being who has lost God, even if he did not acknowledge him.

To remember God is a great task. To remember him not with words, but to live as if he is watching and judging everything I do. Russian peasants say: “Or have you forgotten God?”