God is inherently unknowable…

• To say that we cannot know anything about God is to say something about God; it is to say that if there is a God, he is unknowable. But in that case, he is not entirely unknowable, for the agnostic certainly thinks that we can know one thing about him: That nothing else can be known about him. Budziszewski
• It is not possible for any of us to know if there is a God or not because, by definition, as finite beings operating exclusively within the world we can only know other natural and finite beings and objects. It is not possible for a finite natural being to know a supernatural infinite being. Thomas B. Sheridan
• In the end, we know God as unknown. Thomas Aquinas
• When we give a name to the nameless it is a stumbling block that trips most people. We think that if it has a name, it has an identity. An identity comes with attributes. So we think we know something about it. This is a mistake. For thousands of years this mistake has become ingrained in the human psyche. The word “God” suggests an embodiment of something that can be grasped. We have given a name to the unknown and unknowable and then have spent endless time trying to know it. We try because it has a name; but we must always fail because it is unknowable. Judaism is so concerned about this misunderstanding, it goes to great lengths to avoid naming God. Yet various names seep through because our minds cannot work without symbols. Rabbi David Cooper
• The Essence of God or the Divine Being Himself cannot be known, as there is nothing comparable to Him, and He is infinitely beyond whatever we conceive of Him. Ali Ünal
• God or the sacred is beyond all words, concepts, and images; not “a being,” but “a nonmaterial layer or level or dimension of reality that both permeates everything and at the same time is more than everything. Marcus Borg
• All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God. Voltaire
• The name of God should no longer come from the mouth of man. This word that has so long been degraded by usage no longer means anything…. To use the word God is more than sloth, it is a refusal to think, a king of short cut, a hideous shorthand. Arthur Adamov
• Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
• Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
• Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or absence of knowledge as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore He is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

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…beyond all attempts at comprehension…

• The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans–in pure principle–we do not and never will know all the principles. Buckminster Fuller
• If you understood him, it would not be God. Augustine of Hippo
• I believe in the incomprehensibility of God. Honore de Balzac
• A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words? Somerset Maugham
• I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God — I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least. Walt Whitman
• The best things can’t be said. The second best are misunderstood. That’s because the second best are using the objects of time and space to refer to transcendence. And they are always misunderstood by being interpreted by time and space. The third best: that’s conversation. Heinrich Zimmer
• Science tells me God must exist. My mind tells me I will never understand God. And my heart tells me I am not meant to. Dan Brown
• The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea. John Ruskin
• It is completely incomprehensible to us how God can reveal himself and to some extent make himself known in created beings: eternity in time, immensity in space, infinity in finite, immutability in change, being in becoming, the all, as it were, in that which is nothing. This mystery cannot be comprehended; it can only be gratefully acknowledged. Herman Bavinck
• When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man’s limited powers of comprehension. God, as He really is, is far beyond man’s imagination, let alone understanding. God has revealed only so much of Himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear. John Milton
• The nature of God far surpasses any possibility of complete comprehension by human minds. Keith Ward
• Our understanding of the Divine is inherently incomplete. What we understand as “God” does not come close to the ontology of God. The best we can manage is a shadow, a flickering, imperfect reflection. As contingent beings, limited by time and space, we can’t ever quite get at that Deepening Deep. It is ever beyond and below and above us. David Williams
• God is a philosophical black hole-the point where reason breaks down. Kedar Joshi
• Man can only conceive God within the limitation of his own mind. Mahatma Gandhi
• If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped. Evelyn Underhill
• It is a serious mistake to judge God within the narrow limits of our own understanding and abilities. Sterling W Sill
• If you have understood, then this is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood something else instead of God. If you were able to understand even partially, then you have deceived yourself with your own thoughts. St. Augustine
• My mind tells me I will never understand God. And my heart tells me I am not meant to. Dan Brown 
• In God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought; for it is the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it. Descartes
• Divinity is in its omniscience and omnipotence like a wheel, a circle, a whole, that can neither be understood, nor divided, nor begun nor ended. Hildegard of Bingen
• God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits. George Berkeley

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…beyond all definition…

• We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define him. Joseph Joubert
• How do I define God? I don’t…. People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don’t. Noam Chomsky
• Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought. Annie Besant
• The mind craves for formulations and definitions, always eager to squeeze reality into a verbal shape. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. Rob Bell
• If one allows that it is impossible to define God in intelligible terms, then one is allowing that it is impossible for a sentence to be both significant and be about God. To assert that words are inadequate and approximate does not help, for, because words have only the meanings we give them, if we cannot say what we mean, we cannot genuinely claim to mean anything. No sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent God can possess any literal significance. Alfred J. Ayer
• The problem with trying to define God is that the infinite is not definable. It it were definable, it would not be infinite. Morris T. Johnstone
• I don’t have a definition of God, because I’ve never really understood that word. People have different understandings of it and it’s caused a great deal of conflict. If I had to say what would my definition of God be, if I were going to use that word, I would say that this universe has layers upon layers upon layers of compassion and wisdom beyond ours. Gary Zukav
• God can never be a definition. He is more than even the entirety of the dictionary. Terri Guillemets

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…beyond all thought and conception…

• God is that than which a greater cannot be conceived. Anselm
• God is a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive. Ayn Rand
• I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one? Albert Einstein
• God exists outside of time, and since we are within time, there is no way we will ever totally grasp that concept. Francis Chan
• God transcends all conceptuality. Leland Lewis
• God, if God exists, cannot be known by the mind as a mental concept. Anthony Lambert
• A God who fits within the confines of our conception is useless. God cannot be comprehended by man’s conception or logic. God is an eternal being who transcends the framework of man’s limited logic. Sun Myung Moon
• So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp. Rainer Maria Rilke
• God is more than a projection of human traits, writ large. God is greater than our conception of him. David Layman
• The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. Edgar Allan Poe
• You can’t think your way to God. Deepak Chopra
• There is in the mind no knowledge of God except the knowledge that it does not know Him. St Augustine
• This form of unity wherein God’s knowledge and so on is one with God Himself is beyond the capacity of the mouth to express, beyond the capacity of the ear to hear, and beyond the capacity of the heart of man to apprehend clearly.  Maimonides
• [God] is the fountainhead of all concepts but He Himself cannot be conceived. Jeffrey Brodd
• By “God” we understand something than which nothing greater can be thought. St. Anselm
• It is a vanity of the human mind to think it can confine The Infinite within the limitations of words and concepts. Anthony Lambert
• The Buddha is said to have avoided using the term ‘God’ because of the prevalence of misconceptions surrounding it. He wanted to avoid all the limitations that that conceptualization confounds. David R. Hawkins
• The Master would insist that the final barrier to our attaining God was the word and concept God. Anthony de Mello
• For thought is a bird of Space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly. Kahlil Gibran
• God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that. Joseph Campbell
• To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. Albert Einstein
• Truth begins where thought ends. Michael Jeffreys
• But what do I mean by this God? If you objectify God, you’re going to miss the point. If you make a thought of God, you’re going to miss the point, because the thought is an object. This God is everything put together – nothing in particular. Barry Long

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…beyond all description…

• What Brahman is cannot be described. All things in the world — the Vedas, the Puranas, the Tantras, the six systems of philosophy — have been defiled, like food that has been touched by the tongue, for they have been read or uttered by the tongue. Only one thing has not been defiled in this way, and that is Brahman. No one has ever been able to say what Brahman is. Ramakrishna
• The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren’t content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions – anger, jealousy, etc – to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago. Tom Robbins
• Anyone who knows God cannot describe Him. Anyone who can describe God does not know Him. Paulo Coelho
• Of him there can be neither name nor opinion. Dionysius
• The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao. Lao Tzu
• A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words? William Somerset Maugham
• Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Eckhart Tolle
• It is easy to understand God as long as you don’t try to explain him. Joseph Joubert
• Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description. Anthony de Mello
• Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of him is untrue. Meister Eckhart
• The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Lao Tzu

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…beyond all words, images and symbols…

• The greatest things in life, the divine things, the transcendent things, can’t be talked about. They exist in a dimension we cannot access. Doug Hammack
• Whether you call the principle of existence “God,” “matter,” “energy,” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. Carl Jung
• Where God tears great gaps, we should not try to fill them with human words. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• God is too full, too communicative, too bright and piercing” to be easily spoken of. Benjamin Myers
• Trying to find the Truth through words and speech is like putting your head in a bowl of glue. Yuan Wu
• Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
• I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question: How are you? I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question: What is God? If you think that the Truth can be known from words; if you think that the Sun and the Ocean can an pass through that tiny opening called the mouth, someone should start laughing!  Someone should start wildly laughing now!  Hafez
• We have no words for God. Thomas Aquinas
• We are incapable of grasping God objectively. Soren Kierkegaard
• Humility about our God-images runs deep. In our Hebrew tradition, we were forbidden to even speak the word for God. We stripped out the vowels so it could not be pronounced. “Don’t be deceived into thinking you understand God,” our ancestors were saying. “When you say the word ‘God,’ an image forms in your mind of what you’re talking about. As soon as that image forms, you have reduced God to fit in your brain and any construct you form will be too limited. We cannot contain the vastness of the Divine. So don’t even try. Don’t say the word. Don’t sculpt an image. God is simply too big for the human mind to contain.”   Doug Hammack
• God is “ineffable,” uncontainable in any image. Doug Hammack
• God cannot be represented by an image. We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. We wrong God, and put an affront upon him, if we think so. God honoured man in making his soul after his own likeness; but man dishonours God if he makes him after the likeness of his body. The Godhead is spiritual, infinite, immaterial, incomprehensible, and therefore it is a very false and unjust conception which an image gives us of God. Matthew Henry
• If God is essentially incomprehensible, above all names and thought, beyond every ideal and value, a living God! – How is it possible to say anything at all about the divine? When we do dare to speak, what is the import of the names, images, stories, and concepts that are used? …The most esteemed of our relationships and qualities are articulated as words pointing to God. Elizabeth Johnson
• The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They’re not the Way. Bodhidharma
• The ultimate is unnamable, yet contains all names. Will Wright
• Man demands that God prove Himself in terms of symbols and paradigms or be considered as non-existent. Richard Rose

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…beyond even all imagination

• The power of belief, of God is beyond what mere mortals can Imagine. Richard Cabral
• When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not- God as the raw material for our minds to work on; hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God. If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. If you understand you have failed. Saint Augustine
• Whatever you imagine, God is the opposite of that. Dhul-Nun al-Misri
• Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God. Blaise Pascal
• Forever is longer than you know. Eternal is longer than Forever. God is more than you imagine. God is the energy you call imagination. God is creation. God is first thought. And God is last experience. And God is everything in between. Neale Donald Walsch
• Let her love God as He is in Himself, and not as her imagination says He is, and pictures Him. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• God is truly rich far beyond the imagination of humankind. Joseph Franklin Rutherford
• The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it. Blaise Pascal
• The knowledge of the Divine forms is restrained by the human imagination.   Xenophanes

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Language is simply way too limited when speaking about God…

• The Bible and the church are abundant with speech about God: so many ways of describing God, so many words fragile people offer as we attempt to say something about the infinite, about our encounters with the Holy One—language about God, language for God, language to God; language to petition, to remind, to describe, to announce. But in the Christian tradition there is also a worry about this very abundance, a worry that, since God is infinite and we and our tongues are finite, perhaps we should not—indeed, cannot—say anything about God. God is boundless and perfect; human language is precarious and contingent and decidedly small. Perhaps, say some philosophers, the only true things you can say about God are what God is not—God is not unjust, God is not finite—because to say anything positive is to limit a limitless God. To speak about this boundless being with our pockmarked words might be insulting, or deceiving, or just plain false. Maybe we would come closer to telling the truth if we said very little, or nothing at all. Lauren F. Winner
• Theology is a human endeavor, an intellectual, conceptual activity that relies on language. In other words, in order to “do” theology, theologians need to be able to think, to imagine, and to give expression to their thoughts and imaginings in language. These are the tools theologians have available. These tools allow theologians, and all of us, to talk about God and to know God. But they also set limits on who God is and what we know about God. Our understanding of God is limited by what we can think, imagine, and say. Flora A. Keshgegian
• The point is not that our language is limited; the point is that God is “too much.” God’s utter difference from the world is too much to describe, and God’s nearest intimacy with the world is too near to name. We cannot really say that nearness; we can only gesture toward it and surround the gesture with the knowledge that what we have said is inadequate; and then sometimes stop altogether, and put away all the gestures and all the description and all the speech. I cannot describe God in the same way that I cannot describe a picture I am holding millimeters from my eyes—the picture is made strange and unknowable not because it is distant but because it is so close. Lauren F. Winner
• Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born – the beneficiary in as much as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. Aldous Huxley

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…even though we feel compelled to try

• We struggle with language when we attempt to wrestle from our souls something we sense about the Divine; something we cannot fully articulate. We intuit there is something there, but it eludes us, staying just outside our reach. We have moments when we are bathed in divine experience, when we capture divine love and life and goodness with startling clarity. We stand on a mountaintop or watch an innocent child at play, and our hearts awaken to Something . . . Something. We try to talk about our experience. If we don’t, we feel, the rocks themselves will cry out. If we do not talk about that which cannot be talked about, our hearts will explode within us. God, the incomprehensible, is nevertheless the deepest drive within us. Our deepest longing is to experience that which is not experienceable, to define the indefinable. What can we do but grapple with the limited language we have? But for all this internal need to speak, we are at our best when we do so without the arrogant assumption that our thoughts and words can contain the ineffable Divine. Doug Hammack
• At the heart of the work of theology is this dilemma: God, the divine, is that which by its nature is beyond the limitations of human understanding, imagination, and language. And yet, theologians have asserted, God wants to be known and so God reveals Godself in and to the world. God is also that which human beings seek to know, intimately and truly. Flora A. Keshgegian

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The truth is that all metaphors for God are simply pointers to an ineffable Mystery

• God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being. Those too are categories of thought. I mean it’s as simple as that. So it depends on how much you want to think about it, and whether it’s doing you any good. And whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that’s the ground of your own being. If it isn’t, well, it’s a lie. So half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts. And so, they’re lies. Those are the atheists.” Joseph Campbell
• The thing about metaphors is that, if you give them away, you give away the mystery. OMI
• When a person enters into the experience of God who is ultimately Mystery, the most impeccably traditional doctrines waver, the most precise formulations fade to nothingness, and the most profound symbols dissolve. Robert Egan
• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Albert Einstein
• It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. Stephen King
• I believe God is a name we give to the mystery of the world that is beyond our capacity to understand. Robert Jensen
• The mind of God is a mystery and none can understand it. Rae Carson
• Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing. Henry Miller
• In the rush of religion to define and lay claim to God, we have forgotten that the essence of God is pure mystery. Anthony Lambert
• I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief. Gerry Spence
• We wake, if ever at all, to mystery. Annie Dillard
• The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Albert Einstein
• If you try and penetrate with your limited means the secrets of nature, you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.’ Albert Einstein
• Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery. Ram Dass
• God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Richard P. Feynman

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In fact, all spiritual concepts, including metaphors for God, are ultimately pointers rather than truths

• Words are secondary. What they point to is primary. Eckhart Tolle
• No thought or concept can encapsulate absolute truth. They can only point to it.  Absolute truth is a state of being in which an absolute knowing arises.  It is a state when all words and concepts fall away. It is something you need to experience for yourself.  Relatives truths do exist. A relative truth is that which points to absolute truth. However, relative truth is subjective. A truth that acts as a good pointer for one will not work for another. Anthony Lambert
• Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. Joseph Campbell
• Spiritual concepts exist as signposts to a direct experience, a state of consciousness, where a direct knowing beyond words and concepts arises. Anthony Lambert
• That’s what all the words in this book really are: pointers. Nothing more, nothing less. They point back to the Source, to the origin of all things, which in the final analysis is identical with what you really are, beyond your mind-made life story, and identical with life itself, as it dances in emptiness. Jeff Foster
• Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization. Paramahansa Yogananda

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Our very concepts for God can get in the way of us knowing God through direct experience

• The Master would insist that the final barrier to our attaining God was the word and concept God. Anthony de Mello
• The name of God should no longer come from the mouth of man. This word that has so long been degraded by usage no longer means anything…. To use the word God is more than sloth, it is a refusal to think, a king of short cut, a hideous shorthand. Arthur Adamov

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Hence, we must take our metaphors lightly

• We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn’t claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp. Brian D. McLaren
• As metaphorical, as indirect, as both “true and untrue, and as an affair of the imagination, theology cannot take itself too seriously. Sally McFague
• As we recognize that metaphors are only metaphors, yet nonetheless create and support new models that will shock us into better ways of life, we should do so in the spirit of passionate nonchalance, that is, in the spirit of prayer. Sallie McFague
• Replace unhelpful and outdated metaphorical constructions with new, more life giving ones, without taking any of it too seriously. Sallie McFague
• Sallie McFague… holds that we must very intentionally play with metaphors, “sucking the juice out of them and throwing them away (as the Hebrew psalmists did), using everything and anything the world provides for talking about God, so that no one model is allowed to become a definition. Rebecca A. Meier-Rao

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God, in conception, is the ultimate abstraction for it transcends form

• Since most people would agree that it is impossible to see, touch, taste, smell, or hear God in any physically comprehensible way, the non-metaphorical (literal) idea of God contains a lot of negatives (not human, not visible, not perceptible through hearing or smell or touch or taste, etc.) but little that is concrete. An abstract concept like this, according to cognitive linguistics, is often primarily understood through metaphor. Mary Therese DesCamp
• We cannot use words to describe God in the same way or with the same meaning that we use words to describe creatures, specifically human beings. The statement, “John Doe is wise” means something different from “God is wise”. God’s wisdom is unlimited. On the other hand, we cannot say that language about God is totally equivocal: having two different meanings. We cannot say that God’s wisdom is utterly different from human wisdom. So how do we talk about God? Analogically. David Layman
• The idea of God is so abstract, so vast, and so incomprehensible, that it may only be possible to think about it in metaphors. Adam R. Shapiro
• What is God? God is not what we think It is. God is not a thing, a being, a noun. It does not exist, as existence is defined, for It takes up no space (or includes all space but is not limited by it) and is not bound by time. Jewish mystics often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness. Rabbi David Cooper
• While the Hebrew Psalmists maintain that their concrete realities can and do point to God, they are equally insistent that God is not and cannot be represented by these concrete realities. Despite their focus on immanent language, the Psalmists never lose sight of Yahweh’s transcendence. Melinda Cousins
• We are incapable of grasping God objectively. Soren Kierkegaard

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Ultimately, spiritual evolution is about moving beyond metaphors to a direct experience of God…

• Enough of these phrases, conceit and metaphors, I want burning, burning, burning. Rumi
• He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him. Neil Gaiman
• But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in “contemplation” with a big “C,” or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate. Thomas Merton
• There’s no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we’ve experienced God, not what or who God is. John Shelby Spong
• Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door. John Updike
• Would that we might pass beyond the word into the experience. Richard Kellaway
• More recently, theologians have suggested that human experience is a source for knowledge of God and that experience is, in fact, foundational even to Scripture and tradition. For these theologians scripture is the accumulated record and accepted, collective version of people’s experiences of God. Flora A. Keshgegian
• One man with a genuine experience with God is worth more than a library full of arguments. Vance Havner
• Knowledge about God is of two kinds, direct and indirect. Indirectly we can read scriptures, listen to sermons, consult authorities, and from these sources build a reasonable case that God exists. But such a God transmits no love to Earth. Therefore nothing substitutes for gyana, which is direct knowledge of the divine. Instead of having thoughts about God, you share God’s own thoughts. Deepak Chopra
• Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Though our tradition insists we cannot contain God in our minds, it also insists we can experience God. And when we do, we experience love. As we come to depend less and less on transient and impermanent images, our religion insists that the essential experience of God is of goodness and love. God is good. We are safe. Doug Hammack
• Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. Thomas Merton
• The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God. Paramahansa Yogananda
• You cannot define God. You cannot understand it. You can only dissolve it in. You can only experience it. You can never know it. Whatever knowledge you say you have of God is just cultural nonsense.  Experience does not mean you can grasp it.  You can only experience it by dissolving it it. There is no other way. Sadhguru
• God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul. Jean Paul Richter
• The soul understands what the mind cannot conceive. Neale Donald Walsch
• I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. William James
• [True] spirituality is not an abstract idea, a theory, an ideology, or a movement of some kind. It is a personal lived reality. Sandra Schneiders
• …the mystic is one for whom God is not merely an object of belief, but a living fact experimentally known at first-hand; and mysticism for him becomes, in so far as he responds to its demands, a life based on this conscious communion with God. Evelyn Underhill
• Spirituality is the conscious movement toward fullness and potentiality in God, is lived day by day in the actual experience of communion with God. Rebecca A. Meier-Rao
• Spirituality is not an abstract idea, a theory, an ideology, or a movement of some kind. It is a personal lived reality. Sandra Schneiders
• God is not something that you have to believe in, but something that can be experienced directly. Anthony Lambert

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…an experience of the heart…

• Do not dissect the love of God, but feel it. Emmet Fox  
• It is the heart which experiences God, not the reason. Blaise Pascal
• There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart. Blaise Pascal
• What do you think of God,” the teacher asked. After a pause, the young pupil replied, “He’s not a think, he’s a feel.” Paul Frost    
• There are many paths to enlightenment. Be sure to take one with a heart. Lao Tzu
• Although the intellect is easily fooled, the heart recognizes the truth. Where the intellect is limited, the heart is unlimited; where the intellect is intrigued by the temporary, the heart is only concerned with the permanent. David R. Hawkins
• Earthly things must be known to be loved; Divine things must be loved to be known. Blaise Pascal
• Love is our highest word and the synonym for God. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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… that leads to a sense of indisputable knowing beyond the mind

• One can spend endless lifetimes studying all the spiritual and philosophical teachings of the world and merely end up confused and discouraged. Seek to ‘know’, not to ‘know about’. ‘Know’ implies subjective experience; ‘know about’ means to accumulate facts. In the end, all facts disappear, and there are none to be known. David R. Hawkins
• Spiritual realizations arise spontaneously and not as a consequence of thought processes. They arise in awareness as though coming out of intuition. It is a nonlinear process through which one suddenly becomes aware that they just ‘know’. David R. Hawkins
• In the famous Gifford lectures, James described the experience of consciousness itself as rare, unique, indescribable, and “beyond mind”—a thought-free state of Knowingness that’s complete, all-inclusive, with neither need nor want, and beyond the limitation of experiencing the merely individualized, personal self. David R. Hawkins
• All the teachings the sages have expounded are no more than commentaries on the sudden cry… Ah, This! Zen Master Daie
• You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world. You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be. Roni Horn

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Any metaphor for God fervently believed in is a poor substitute for the living experience of God

• Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called “God.” As soon as you turn away from it, God ceases to be a reality in your life, and all you are left with is the mental concept of God, which some people believe in and others deny. Even belief in God is only a poor substitute for the living reality of God manifesting every moment of your life. Eckhart Tolle
• People substitute tradition for the living experience of the love of God. Francis Howgill
• She cut herself loose from the moorings of Scripture and tradition and appealing only to experience and credibility as her guides. Trevor Hart
• One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God. Carl Jung
• To know much and taste nothing-of what use is that? Bonaventure
• The irony is that religion, if trapped in a conceptual prison, can block higher states of consciousness that lead to direct experiences of God. Anthony Lambert
• To know much and taste nothing-of what use is that? Bonaventure

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Some religious and spiritual traditions focus more on knowing the Unknowable through silence, contemplation and negation…

• Our contemplative ancestors taught us to live and thrive when our God is unknown and unknowable. Theirs was the wisdom that God’s primary language is silence, and that we discover a vibrant faith soaking in the silence of meditation and contemplation. They introduced us to the spirituality of a God beyond images and metaphors. We use the word “apophatic” to describe this part of our spiritual tradition. Through the centuries, we’ve developed contemplative practices that awaken us to the Divine Presence beyond our mind’s ability to contain. Doug Hammack
• To invoke apophatic theology is to imply that God is ultimately unknowable, so we can say very little about God, or, alternately, we can say things about God but we cannot really know what the many things we do in fact say actually mean. Lauren F. Winner
• If we attend to the Greek etymology of the word theology, then a curious state of linguistic affairs results from its combination with the word apophatic. For theology means “discourse about God” . . . so the expression “apophatic theology” ought to mean something like: “that speech about God which is the failure of speech. Denys Turner
• The insight that human language is tarnished, even fallen, and that when applied to God, it can distort—the “astringent” suggestion that God’s unknowability demands we say nothing of God at all—threads through the centuries of Christian prayer and writing. Lauren F. Winner
• There is a sense in which any writing or speaking about God can only be an edging close and then a veering off again, a fumbling after hints, shadows, and guesses, a groping in the dark. Christian tradition has at times seemed far too certain of itself and of its affirmation of the names and nature of God. Yet Christianity has also hallowed the apophatic way, the way of silence, negation and paradox, in which we can only stutter ‘Not this, not this’ and every positive image must be canceled out by its opposite. Nicola Slee
• The philosophers who pioneered apophatic rumination were not, I suspect, aiming to comfort. Probably they were aiming to unsettle. But there is a comfort here nonetheless. The philosopher’s hesitation about language is a chastening reminder that we ought not place too much faith in whatever our religious construct is. When the construct fails us, as it surely will, we will remember that there was presumption in giving our heart so wholly to whatever it was we had said about God anyway. And when the construct fails us, maybe we will glimpse the God beneath the picture we had faithfully, longingly, lovingly made. Hush. In this poverty of expression, thou findest that He is all. Lauren F. Winner
• For a prayer oriented religion the concept of a personal God is needed – to relate to. For meditation-oriented religions God is a useless hypothesis; it can be discarded easily into the dustbin. It is not needed. Rajneesh
• The Hindus point at what cannot be spoken by calling it Neti Neti: Not this, Not this, or neither this nor that. Leo Hartong
• When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not- God as the raw material for our minds to work on; hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God. If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not any created thing. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.  John Scotus Erigena
• Our thought cannot grasp the One as long as any other image remains active in the soul . . To this end, you must set free your soul from all outward things and turn wholly within yourself, with no more leaning to what lies outside, and lay your mind bare of ideal forms, as before of the objects of sense, and forget even yourself, and so come within sight of that One.   Plotinus
• Lewis, in his book Miracles, advocates the use of negative theology when first thinking about God, in order to cleanse our minds of misconceptions. He goes on to say we must then refill our minds with the truth about God, untainted by mythology, bad analogies or false mind-pictures.  P. H Brazier
• Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or absence of knowledge as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore He is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge. Pseudo-Dionysius
• Now, because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.  Thomas Aquinas

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…allowing one to rest in the presence of God beyond the realm of the mind

• As our apophatic tradition leads us beyond images, we become more comfortable in the presence of divine mystery, not needing to frame a God who is “like this,” or who will “do that.” Instead, our contemplative practice awakens and feeds our ceaseless yearning for the Ultimate, for the Deep from which we come. Apophatic spirituality invites us feel comfortable being one with divine Presence through inner quiet that does not try to direct or maneuver God. Doug Hammack
• The testimony of those who have gone before us is unanimous. When we focus on simply being present to the indwelling Presence, something happens to us. Our thoughts, feelings, and assumptions about God change. People of steadfast contemplative practice begin to frame God less as the metaphor-God, and more as an experience of love. Doug Hammack

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Once a metaphor has satisfied the mind with understanding, move beyond it and enter into the great silence…

• If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing. Thomas Merton
• God is silence

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… into a state of pure being

• Such words as ‘God’ and ‘Death’ and ‘Suffering’ and ‘Eternity’ are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be. Etty Hillesum
• The one unalterable reality is being. Until you realize that state of pure being you should pursue the enquiry. If once you are established in it there will be no further worry. Ramana Maharshi

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Let go of need to know…

• Great leaps in levels of consciousness are always preceded by surrender of the illusion that “I know.” David R. Hawkins

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…and embrace the exquisite Mystery of it All beyond all words and concepts

• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Albert Einstein
• An appreciation of mystery was central to our experience of God. Doug  Hammack
• The mystery of God hugs you in its all-encompassing arms. Hildegard of Bingen
• Life is a mystery – mystery of beauty, bliss and divinity. Meditation is the art of unfolding that mystery. Amit Ray
• You believe God is not there, but He is, Hidden in the secret of the divine mystery. Rumi
• The experience of conscious communion with God makes way for a no-experience in which the only thing the person can do is yield to the unknown Mystery. In that yielding, a new self is born.  Rebecca A. Meier-Rao