Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

What I have experienced, and experienced repeatedly, is the silence of God. For many years, this was a distressing matter for me. I did not consider it an experience, but the absence of an experience.

When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

It's hard to say, 'I don't believe in God.' I would love to know if God exists. But it's a very difficult thing for me to believe.

Certainly, I find that 'Mere Christianity' speaks to me. So why am I still an agnostic? Beats me.

Sometimes my life just don't make sense at all. The mountains looks so big and my faith just seems so small.

Holy Saturday. The best reminder that the silence of God doesn't equal the absence of God.

Don't misinterpret God's silence as rejection.

Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.

[I'm] almost positive there is no God.

I began asking, 'How can we know Christianity is true?' Sadly, none of the adults in my life offered an answer. Eventually I decided Christianity must not have any answers, and I became an agnostic.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already

Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church. Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks. No, I realise. It's the reverse.

Is there a God? There is, but we don't know where. Or who. And, indeed, why.

O God, for as much as without Thee We are not enabled to doubt Thee, Help us all by Thy grace To convince the whole race It knows nothing whatever about Thee.

When Zarathustra was alone . . . he said to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

How many lost souls do You need, Lord, to satisfy Your hunger? the hatter asked. God, in His infinite silence, looked at him without blinking.

I turned to speak to God About the world's despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.