Motivational Quotes

Religion

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

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

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.

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

Elizabeth Aston

10.

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

11.

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

Stella Terrill Mann

12.

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

Arnold, Matthew

13.

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

14.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

15.

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

16.

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

James Feibleman

17.

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

18.

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

19.

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

Jane Austen

20.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

21.

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

22.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

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

Pascal, Blaise

24.

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

25.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

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

27.

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

Waiter Rant

28.

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

29.

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

Oscar Wilde

30.

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

Carl Sandburg

31.

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.

32.

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

H. L. Mencken

33.

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

Abraham Lincoln

34.

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

35.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

39.

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

40.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

41.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Sade, Marquis De

42.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

43.

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

44.

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

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

46.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Maistre, Joseph De

47.

The only time anyone's admitted they were a Christian before was when they were busy telling me why they're better than me.

Randy K. Milholland

48.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

49.

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

50.

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

Inge, Dean William R.