Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Matthew Arnold

Best Quotes about Religion

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

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

Kraus, Karl

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

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.

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

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

10.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

11.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

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

Ian McKellen

13.

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

Hope, Bob

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

18.

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

19.

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

Jane Austen

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

24.

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

25.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

26.

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

Elizabeth Aston

27.

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

James Feibleman

28.

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

Inge, Dean William R.

29.

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

H. L. Mencken

30.

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

Marlowe, Christopher

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Arnold, Matthew

34.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Waiter Rant

38.

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

39.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Carl Sandburg

46.

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

47.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

48.

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

Matthew Arnold

49.

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

50.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De