Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

Best Quotes about Religion

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

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

Kraus, Karl

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

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

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

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

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

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

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

10.

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

11.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

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

Pound, Ezra

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

18.

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

Arnold, Matthew

19.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

20.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Doris Egan

24.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

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

Chartier, Emile-Auguste

26.

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

27.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

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

Matthew Arnold

31.

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

Updike, John

32.

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

Waiter Rant

33.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

34.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

H. L. Mencken

44.

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

Marlowe, Christopher

45.

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

James Feibleman

47.

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

Oscar Wilde

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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