Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

Best Quotes about Religion

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

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

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

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Carl Sandburg

10.

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

Doris Egan

11.

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

Elizabeth Aston

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Waiter Rant

18.

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

Marlowe, Christopher

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

Chartier, Emile-Auguste

30.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Arnold, Matthew

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

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

Matthew Arnold

38.

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

Abraham Lincoln

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Hope, Bob

42.

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

Oscar Wilde

43.

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

Ian McKellen

44.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

45.

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

46.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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