Most Popular Choices

Related Topic(s):

Quotations on Religion

Return to Quotations Central

 

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
Einstein
 
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.
Einstein
 
The most important function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive.
Einstein
 
Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself as something wholy different from the profane ...the history of religions...is constituted by a great number of ..manifestations of sacred realities. ...in each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act-- the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane
 
Good work and religion are one.
Elbert Hubbard
 
Pope Julius was right-- work is religion when you put your soul into your task.
Elbert Hubbard
 
My religion of life is always to be cheerful.
George Meredith
 
It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion.
M. Scott Peck, TRLT
 
It seems the more learned a man is the less consideration he has for another man's belief.
Will Rogers
 
There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.
Albert Schweitzer
 
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Swift
 
Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.
Zangwill, ib.
 
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
--Peggy Noonan , speech writer for presidents Reagan and Bush, 1996
 
Many have quarreled about religion that never practiced it.
--Benjamin Franklin
 
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
--Gilbert K. Chesterton
 
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
--Madame de Staæl
 
Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.
--Robert Green Ingersoll
 
Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there.
--Mohammed Neguib
 
You can change your faith without changing gods, and vice versa.
--Stanislaw J. Lec
 
All religions must be tolerated, for every man must get to heaven in his own way.
--Frederick the Great
 
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H. L. Mencken
 
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
--Denis Diderot
 
Today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
--Adolf Hitler (Reichstag speech, 1936)
 
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.
--Timothy Jones
 
God has no place within these walls, just as facts have no place within organized religion.
--Superintendent Chalmers, on the Simpsons cartoon show  (#100, 1994)
 
My mind is my own church.
--Thomas Paine
 
Pray to God, but hammer away.
--Spanish Proverb
 
To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.
--William Penn
 
Zeal is very blind, or badly regulated, when it encroaches upon the rights of others.
--Quesnel
 
Zen had the right flow for me: humor, intransigence and a certain feet-on-the -ground character
John Cage 1981 Letter to Kirk Allison
 
Let us fear God and we shall cease to live.
Mahatma Gandhi
 
When faith becomes blind it dies.
Mahatma Gandhi
 
He who has science and art has religion too.
Goethe
 
There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion.
Thoreau
 
Theology, not religion, is the antithesis to science.
Toynbee
 
Religion will not gain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.
Alfred North Whitehead
 
Science-- in other words, knowledge-- is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.
OW Holmes Sr.
 
There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof seek blessedness.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
 
In my father's house are many mansions.
New Testament, John, xiv, 2
 
Religious history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has lapsed from the minds of men.
Wm. James
 
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it parted by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimuli and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application. No account of the universe in its totality can be final, which leaves other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question - for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate they forbid a premature closing of our accounts of reality."
Wm James Varieties of Religious Experience
 
As one can ascend to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a bamboo or a staircase or a rope, so diverse are the ways and means to approach God, and every religion in the world shows one of these ways.
Ramakrishna
 
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
GB Shaw
 
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.
Bertrand Russel
 
Insist on freedom of soul far before freedom of person. Moral liberty alone is important and necessary; the only good, the only use in other liberty is to aid that.
Joubert
 
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Pascal
 
If God did not exist, it would be necesary to invent him.
Voltaire
 
...as long as there are fools and rascals there will be religions.
Voltaire, letter to Frederick the Great
 
I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian.
Ghandi
 
The best religion is the most tolerant.
Mme. de Girardin
 
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
John Morley
 
True religion is the poetry of the heart; it has enchantments useful to our manners; it gives us both happiness and virtue.
Joubert
 
Religion is as necessary to reason as reasion is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other, A reasoning being would lose his reason, in attempting to account for the great phenomena of nature, had he not a Supreme Being to refer to; and well has it been said, that if there had been no God, mankind would have been obliged to imagine one.
Washington
 
Religion without joy... is no religion.
Theodore Parker
 
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
 
When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
Sigmund freud
 
Nothing can be hostile to religion which is agreeable to justice.
Gladstone
 
When people cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
G.K. Chesterson
 
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Tennyson
 
Religion is a way of walking, not a way of talking.
Dean William R, Inge
 
We may as well tolerate all religions, since God himself tolerates all.
Fenelon
 
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.
Voltaire
 
Be sure that religion cannot be right that a man is the worst for having.
William Penn
 
Religion is the opiate of the people.
Karl Marx, A Criticism of the HEgelian Philosophy of Law, 1844
 
Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown land, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.
Benjamin Disraeli
 
I have never yet met a healthy person who worries very much about his health or a really good person who worries much about his own soul.
J.B.S. Haldane
 
The whole history of civilizatin is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 1826-1877
 
The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, bu to be better than yourself. Religion is relative to the individual.
Beecher
 
Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.
Emerson
 
All natural results are spontaneous. The diamond sparkles without effort, and the flowers open impulsively beneath the summer rain. And true teligion is a spontaneous thing, as natural as it is to weep, to love, or to rejoice.
Chapin
 
Let us accept different forms of religion among men, as we accept different languages, wherein there is still but one human nature expressed. Every genius has most power in his own language, and every heart in its own religion.
Richter
 
If men are so wicked with reliion, what would they be without it?
Ben Franklin
 
The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
Emerson
 
The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature.
Emerson, Nature, 1836
 
Every religion is good that teaches man to be good.
Thomas Paine
 
The world is my country, all mankind aremy brethren, and to do good is my religion.
Thomas Paine
 
Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
Alan Watts
 
There are no atheists in fox-holes.
Rev, Wm, T. Cummings, Sermon at Bataan, March 1942
 
Religion converts despair, which destroys, into resignation, which submits.
Lady Blessington
 
Even in religious fervor there is a touch of animal heat.
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1870
 
Human things must be known to be loved, but Divine things must be loved to be known.
Pascal
 
Of all joyful, smiling, ever-laughing experiences, there are none like those which spring from true religion.
Henry Ward Beecher
 
The true meaning of religion is not merely morality but morality touched by emotion.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: Sweetness and Light
 
Nothing exposes religionn more to the reproach of its enemies than the worldliness and hard-heartedness of the professors of it.
Matthew Henry
 
Ah! What a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.
Shelley
 
What religion is he of? Why, he is an anythingarian.
Jonathan Swift
 
I am for religion, against religions.
Victor Hugo: Les Miserables, 1862
 
The true office of religion is to bring out the whole nature of man in harmonious activity.
W.E. Channing
 
His religion, at best, is an anxious wish:-- like that of Rabelais, a "a great Perhaps."
Thomas Carlyle, Burns
 
My altars are the mountains and the ocean,
Earth, air, stars,-- all that springs from the great Whole,
Who hath produced and will receive the soul
Byron, Don Juan
 
Christiandom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.
Soren Kierkegaard, in Time Magazine, 12/16, 1946,
 
Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.
Epictetus
 
The religion of Christ is peace and good-will-- the religion of Chistendom is war and ill-will.
W.S. Landor
 
To know but one religion is not to know that one.
Elbert Hubbard,
 
While true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.
Colton
 
Pure religion may generally be measured by the cheerfulness of its professors, and superstition by the gloom of its victims.
Chatfield
 
All belief which does not render more hapy, more free, more loving, more active, more calm, is, I fear, an erroneous and superstitious belief.
Lavater
 
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
Wm James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902
 
Religion is the vaccine of the imagination.
Napoleon
 
Into the bosom of the one great sea
Flow streams that come from hills on every side,
Their names are various as their springs,
And thus in every land do men bow down
To one great God, though known by many names.
Sir Sarvepalli Rashakrishnan, Hindu View of Life
 
If we subject everything to reason our religion will have nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
Pascal
 
A man who has never had religion before, no more grows religious when he is sick, than a man who has never learnt figures can count, when he has need of calculation.
Samuel Johnson
 
A true religious instinct never deprived man of one single joy; mournful faces and a somber aspect are the conventional affectations of the weakminded.
Hosea Ballou
 
"heart" is merely another name for the Supreme Spirit, because He is in all hearts.
Sri Ramana Maharshi
 
Silence is the language of God. It is also the language of the heart.
Swami Sivananda
 
Image worship is very necessary for beginners.
Swami Sivananda
 
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
 
Diversity of worship has divided the human race into seventy-two nations. From among all their dogmas, I have selected one,-- Divine Love.
Omar Khayam
 
 
All religions have been made by men.
Napoleon Bonaparte, 1760-1821
 
Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease.
Heraclitus, 500 BC
 
What excellent fools religion makes of men.
Ben Jonson, Sejanus, 1603
 
I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as religious devotion.
Michel De Montaigne, Essays
 
A good life is the only religion.
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

 

Tell A Friend