Motivational Quotes

Religion

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

- Lucretius

Best Quotes about Religion

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Marx, Karl

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

Jane Austen

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

Angels dancing on the head of a pin dissolve into nothingness at the bedside of a dying child.

Waiter Rant

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

Lafollette, Suzanne

Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it's glories.

Young, Brigham

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.

Feuerbach, Ludwig

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Pascal, Blaise

Clergymen have much the same in their breeches as other men.

Elizabeth Aston

10.

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

James Feibleman

11.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Albert Einstein

13.

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.

Thomas Jefferson

14.

I do benefits for all religions -- I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.

Hope, Bob

15.

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

16.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Pound, Ezra

17.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

Bakunin, Mikhail

18.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg

19.

And lips say God be pitiful, who never said, God be praised.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

21.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

James, William

22.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Matthew Arnold

23.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.

Tillich, Paul

25.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.

Rushdie, Salman

26.

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former -- of the corruption of the will.

Herzen, Alexander

27.

The only time anyone's admitted they were a Christian before was when they were busy telling me why they're better than me.

Randy K. Milholland

28.

Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people.

Doris Egan

29.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

Religion is like holding on to a rock in the middle of a raging river; faith is learning how to swim.

31.

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

Charles Lamb

32.

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.

George Burns

33.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence.

Marlowe, Christopher

35.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

36.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Updike, John

37.

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

38.

When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.

Nerval, Gerard De

39.

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction.

Ian McKellen

40.

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.

Freud, Sigmund

41.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

Twain, Mark

42.

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

Quinet, Edgar

43.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

Inge, Dean William R.

44.

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

Hoagland, Edward

45.

A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; -- nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

46.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

H. L. Mencken

47.

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?

Martineau, Harriet

48.

It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.

Radhakrishnan, Sir Sarvepalli

49.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Russell, Bertrand

50.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl