Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Religion

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

Carl Sandburg

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

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

Doris Egan

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

Marlowe, Christopher

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

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

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

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

Jane Austen

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

Waiter Rant

10.

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

11.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

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

H. L. Mencken

13.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

17.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

18.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

19.

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

20.

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

Abraham Lincoln

21.

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

22.

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

Arnold, Matthew

23.

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

Elizabeth Aston

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Matthew Arnold

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

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

32.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

33.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

34.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

39.

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

40.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

Eric Hoffer

41.

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

Pascal, Blaise

42.

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

Updike, John

43.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

Hobbes, Thomas

44.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

46.

Religion I have disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give to them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had that and I had not given them one cent, they would be rich. If they have not that, and I had given them the world, they would be poor.

Henry, Patrick

47.

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

48.

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

Hope, Bob

49.

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

Chartier, Emile-Auguste

50.

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

Kraus, Karl