Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Religion

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

Arnold, Matthew

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

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

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.

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

Elizabeth Aston

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

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

Hope, Bob

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

12.

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

Doris Egan

13.

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

14.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

22.

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

23.

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

Jane Austen

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Updike, John

28.

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

Waiter Rant

29.

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

30.

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

31.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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.

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

41.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Carl Sandburg

45.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

46.

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

47.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

48.

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

Matthew Arnold

49.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

50.

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