Motivational Quotes

Religion

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

- Martineau, Harriet

Best Quotes about 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

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

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.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

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

Matthew Arnold

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

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

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

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

10.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

11.

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

12.

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

Kraus, Karl

13.

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

14.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

21.

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

Oscar Wilde

22.

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

Updike, John

23.

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

24.

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

Arnold, Matthew

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Hope, Bob

31.

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

32.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

33.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

34.

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.

35.

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

H. L. Mencken

36.

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

37.

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

38.

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.

George Burns

39.

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

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.

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

42.

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

Jane Austen

43.

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

44.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

45.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

46.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

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

Pascal, Blaise

48.

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

Elizabeth Aston

49.

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

Doris Egan

50.

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