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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Creation

Creation is great, and cannot be understood.

Carlyle.

  • All are but parts of one stupendous whale,
  • Whose Body Nature is, and God the soul.
  • Pope.

  • Silently as a dream the fabric rose;
  • No sound of hammer or of saw was there.
  • Cowper.

    As Thou has created me out of mingled air and glitter, I thank Thee for it.

    Rückert.

    God only opened His hand to give flight to a thought that He had held imprisoned from eternity.

    Timothy Titcomb.

    God may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world for special ends and purposes.

    Robert Boyle.

    A spontaneous production is against matter of fact; a thing without example, not only in man, but the vilest of weeds.

    Bentley.

  • The chain that’s fixed to the throne of Jove,
  • On which the fabric of our world depends,
  • One link dissolved, the whole creation ends.
  • Edmund Waller.

  • One God, one law, one element,
  • And one far-off divine event,
  • To which the whole creation moves.
  • Tennyson.

  • Though to recount almighty works
  • What words of tongue or seraph can suffice,
  • Or heart of man suffice to comprehend?
  • Milton.

  • Open, ye heavens, your living doors; let in
  • The great Creator from His work returned
  • Magnificent, His six days’ work, a world!
  • Milton.

    Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

    Alphonso the Wise.

  • Nature, they say, doth dote,
  • And cannot make a man
  • Save on some worn-out plan,
  • Repeating us by rote.
  • Lowell.

    The wisdom and goodness of the Maker plainly appears in the parts of this stupendous fabric, and the several degrees and ranks of creatures in it.

    Locke.

    A wonder it must be, that there should be any man found so stupid as to persuade himself that this most beautiful world could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.

    John Ray.

  • God is a worker: He has thickly strewn
  • Infinity with grandeur: God is love:
  • He shall wipe away creation’s tears,
  • And all the worlds shall summer in His smile.
  • Smith.

    No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out of heaven from God.

    Seeley.

    It became Him who created it to set it in order; and if he did so, it is unphilosophical to seek for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of Nature.

    Newton.

  • Through knowledge we behold the world’s creation,
  • How in his cradle first he fostered was;
  • And judge of Nature’s cunning operation,
  • How things she formed of a formless mass.
  • Spenser.

  • What cause
  • Moved the Creator in His holy rest
  • Through all eternity so late to build
  • In chaos, and, the work begun, how soon
  • Absolved.
  • Milton.

    Whoever considers the study of anatomy I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man’s body and coherence of his parts being so strange and paradoxical that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of Nature.

    Herbert of Cherbury.

  • In the vast, and the minute, we see,
  • The unambiguous footsteps of the God,
  • Who gives its lustre to an insect’s wing
  • And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds.
  • Cowper.

  • From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
  • This universal frame began:
  • From harmony, to harmony,
  • Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
  • The diapason closing full in man.
  • Dryden.

  • Then tower’d the palace, then in awful state
  • The temple rear’d its everlasting gate.
  • No workman steel, no ponderous axes rung,
  • Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprung.
  • Bishop Heber.

  • Let no presuming impious railer tax
  • Creative wisdom as if aught was form’d
  • In vain, or not for admirable ends.
  • Shall little haughty ignorance pronounce
  • His works unwise of which the smallest part
  • Exceeds the narrow vision of his mind?
  • Thomson.

    The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.

    Bible.

  • For wonderful indeed are all His works,
  • Pleasant to know, and worthiest to be all
  • Had in remembrance always with delight;
  • But what created mind can comprehend
  • Their number, or the wisdom infinite
  • That brought them forth, but hid their causes deep?
  • Milton.

  • The spacious firmament on high,
  • With all the blue ethereal sky,
  • And spangled heavens, a shining frame
  • Their great Original proclaim.
  • *****
  • Forever singing as they shine
  • The hand that made us is divine.
  • Addison.

    How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world?

    Tillotson.

  • From nature’s constant or eccentric laws,
  • The thoughtful soul this general inference draws,
  • That an effect must pre-suppose a cause;
  • And, while she does her upward flight sustain,
  • Touching each link of the continued chain,
  • At length she is oblig’d and forc’d to see
  • A first, a source, a life, a Deity;
  • Which has forever been, and must forever be.
  • Prior.

    The ever varying brilliancy and grandeur of the landscape, and the magnificence of the sky, sun, moon and stars, enter more extensively into the enjoyment of mankind than we, perhaps ever think, or can possibly apprehend, without frequent and extensive investigation. This beauty and splendour of the objects around us, it is ever to be remembered, is not necessary to their existence, nor to what we commonly intend by their usefulness. It is therefore to be regarded as a source of pleasure, gratuitously superinduced upon the general nature of the objects themselves, and in this light, a testimony of the divine goodness, peculiarly affecting.

    Dwight.

    We cannot look around us, without being struck by the surprising variety and multiplicity of the sources of beauty of creation, produced by form, or by colour, or by both united. It is scarcely too much to say, that every object in nature, animate or inanimate, is in some manner beautiful, so largely has the Creator provided for our pleasures, through the sense of sight. It is rare to see anything, which is in itself distasteful, or disagreeable to the eye, or repulsive.

    Macculloch.