Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Best Quotes about Religion

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

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.

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

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

If religion is only human, and its form is man's form, it follows that everything in religion is true.

Chartier, Emile-Auguste

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

Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without assistance.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

14.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Whatever God's dream about man may be, it seems certain it cannot come true unless man cooperates.

Stella Terrill Mann

20.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

21.

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

22.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

23.

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

Elizabeth Aston

24.

Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

Jane Austen

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

28.

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

Abraham Lincoln

29.

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

30.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Marlowe, Christopher

34.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Doris Egan

38.

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

Hope, Bob

39.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

40.

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

Ian McKellen

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

44.

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

45.

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

Arnold, Matthew

47.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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