Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Ian McKellen

Best Quotes about Religion

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

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

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

Marlowe, Christopher

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

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

Waiter Rant

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

James Feibleman

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Elizabeth Aston

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Updike, John

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

H. L. Mencken

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

23.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

24.

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.

25.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Ian McKellen

31.

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

32.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

33.

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

Pascal, Blaise

34.

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

Hope, Bob

35.

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

36.

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

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.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Jane Austen

43.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

44.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

45.

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

46.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Doris Egan

50.

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