QuoteProject
If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
Voltaire
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote suggests that the belief in God is an inherent part of human nature and the order of the universe.

Voltaire's quote reflects on the necessity of the concept of God in human understanding and society. He articulates that even if God did not exist in reality, humanity would feel compelled to create this concept to make sense of the intelligence and order present in nature. The quote further emphasizes that the natural world reveals a higher power and intelligence, asserting humanity's reliance on this greater force.

Themes

GodNatureIntelligenceOrderDependence

In practice

Example use cases

During a philosophical discussion on the existence of God, this quote could serve to illustrate the human inclination towards belief.

More from Voltaire

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
VoltaireRead
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.
VoltaireRead
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
VoltaireRead
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
VoltaireRead
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
VoltaireRead
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
VoltaireRead

Similar quotes

At some point you have to stop acting as though life is happening to you and acknowledge the ways you are happening to it. Once you take responsibility for your side of the street, you grant yourself the power to improve every aspect of your life by simply acting and behaving differently.
Jillian MichaelsRead
Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.
Gary L. FrancioneRead
Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.
Robert KennedyRead
Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.
Phillips BrooksRead
One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph SchellingRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.