Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

Best Quotes about Religion

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

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

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Jane Austen

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

10.

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

11.

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

Marlowe, Christopher

12.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

13.

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

14.

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

Updike, John

15.

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

16.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

17.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

18.

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

Carl Sandburg

19.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

20.

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

Chartier, Emile-Auguste

21.

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

Hope, Bob

22.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

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

31.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

32.

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

Waiter Rant

33.

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

34.

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

H. L. Mencken

35.

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

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

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

Matthew Arnold

39.

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.

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

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.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

46.

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.

47.

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

Ian McKellen

48.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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