Nicholas of Cusa Quotes on God
Nicholas of Cusa was a German cardinal, philosopher, and mathematician at the threshold between the medieval and Renaissance worlds. This page collects quotes attributed to Nicholas of Cusa on the topic of god, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Nicholas of Cusa:
“God is the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum at the same time.”
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Attributed to Nicholas of Cusa:
“All things are what they are because the infinite makes them so.”
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Attributed to Nicholas of Cusa:
“The center of the universe is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”
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“It is you, O God, who is being sought in various religions in various ways, and named with various names. For you remain as you are, to all incomprehensible and inexpressible. When you will graciously grant it then sword, jealous hatred and evil will cease and all will come to know that there is but one religion in the variety of religious rites.”
Great Thoughts Treasury -
“God, therefore, is the one most simple essence of the entire universe.”
ibid. -
“Within itself the soul sees all things more truly than as they exist in different things outside itself. And the more it goes out unto other things in order to know them, the more it enters into itself in order to know itself.”
Nicholas of Cusa and Jasper Hopkins (Translator). On Equality. 1459. -
“Life, as it exists on Earth in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose in a high form in the solar and stellar regions. Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled – and that with beings perhaps of an inferior type – we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions”
De docta ignorantia -
“The universe has no circumference , for if it had a center and a circumference there would be some and some thing beyond the world, suppositions which are wholly lacking in truth. Since, therefore, it is impossible that the universe should be enclosed within a corporeal center and corporeal boundary, it is not within our power to understand the universe, whose center and circumference are God . And though the universe cannot be infinite, nevertheless it cannot be conceived as finite since there are no limits within which it could be confined.”
ibid.