Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

Best Quotes about Religion

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

H. L. Mencken

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

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

Stella Terrill Mann

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Arnold, Matthew

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

10.

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

Doris Egan

11.

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

12.

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

Elizabeth Aston

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Kraus, Karl

19.

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

20.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

21.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

22.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

26.

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

27.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Ian McKellen

31.

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

Pound, Ezra

32.

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

37.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

38.

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

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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.

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

42.

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

James Feibleman

43.

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

Hope, Bob

44.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

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

46.

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

Abraham Lincoln

47.

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

Marlowe, Christopher

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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