Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Matthew Arnold

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

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

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

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

Waiter Rant

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

12.

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

Elizabeth Aston

13.

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

14.

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

Updike, John

15.

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

Oscar Wilde

16.

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

17.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Arnold, Matthew

23.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

24.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

H. L. Mencken

29.

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

Carl Sandburg

30.

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.

31.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

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

43.

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

Kraus, Karl

44.

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

45.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

46.

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

47.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

48.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

49.

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

50.

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

Pascal, Blaise