Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

Best Quotes about Religion

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

Chartier, Emile-Auguste

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

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

Stella Terrill Mann

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

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

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

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

15.

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

Waiter Rant

16.

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

Elizabeth Aston

17.

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

18.

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

Oscar Wilde

19.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

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

James Feibleman

21.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

34.

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

35.

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

Matthew Arnold

36.

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

37.

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

Hope, Bob

38.

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

39.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

40.

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

41.

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

Pascal, Blaise

42.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

43.

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

44.

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

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

46.

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

47.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

48.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

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

Abraham Lincoln

50.

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