Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Marlowe, Christopher

Best Quotes about Religion

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

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

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

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

Arnold, Matthew

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Chartier, Emile-Auguste

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.

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

Doris Egan

16.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

17.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

18.

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

Elizabeth Aston

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Pascal, Blaise

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.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

James Feibleman

28.

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

Updike, John

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

40.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

41.

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

42.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

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

H. L. Mencken

44.

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

45.

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

Waiter Rant

46.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

47.

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.

48.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

49.

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

Jane Austen

50.

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

Kraus, Karl