Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

Best Quotes about Religion

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

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

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

H. L. Mencken

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

13.

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

14.

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

Matthew Arnold

15.

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

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.

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

Arnold, Matthew

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Updike, John

22.

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

Doris Egan

23.

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

Jane Austen

24.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

27.

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

Marlowe, Christopher

28.

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

29.

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

Abraham Lincoln

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction.

Ian McKellen

34.

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

35.

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

Waiter Rant

36.

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

37.

Feuerbach, Ludwig

38.

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

Hope, Bob

39.

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

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

James Feibleman

42.

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

43.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

44.

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

Carl Sandburg

45.

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

46.

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

Oscar Wilde

47.

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

48.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

49.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

50.

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