Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Bierce, Ambrose

Best Quotes about Religion

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

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

Hope, Bob

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

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

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

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

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

My mom grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx and gave me an invaluable piece of advice for dealing with people in New York - if someoneÆs bugging you just act crazy. IÆve modified her approach somewhat. Public displays of religiosity work just as well as feigning psychosis.

Waiter Rant

10.

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

11.

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.

Gurdjieff, George

12.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

13.

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

14.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

15.

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

16.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

17.

A good test of a man's religion is its vitality.

18.

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

19.

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

Waiter Rant

20.

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

Abraham Lincoln

21.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Ian McKellen

23.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Einstein, Albert

24.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

D. H. Lawrence

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

28.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

29.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

Lewis, C. S.

30.

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

Carl Sandburg

31.

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

32.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

33.

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

Frye, Northrop

34.

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

Pascal, Blaise

35.

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

Matthew Arnold

36.

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

Elizabeth Aston

37.

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

38.

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

H. L. Mencken

39.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

Niebuhr, Reinhold

40.

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

Arnold, Matthew

41.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

46.

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

47.

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

48.

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

49.

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

Doris Egan

50.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

Lawrence, D. H.