Religious Quotations

Quotations of a divine inspiration? Or possibly simply concerning some aspect of religion.

Showing 1 through 36 of 162 quotations in this category.

"If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind."

-William Clifford

"'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued. 'There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'"

-Joseph Heller, Catch22

"Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith."

-Thomas Jefferson

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

-Stephen Roberts

"When no one had answers they created God. Now we have most of them, and ne day we will have all of them, rendering God useless."

-unknown

"The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action."

-Albert Einstein

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

-Buddha

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

-George Bernard Shaw

"My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality."

-Albert Einstein

"Why do you write to me "God should punish the English"? I have no close connection to either one or the other. I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him."

-Albert Einstein

"If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can."

-Norman Mailer

"You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

-Reverend Robert Cromey

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

-Thomas Paine

"I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies."

-Albert Einstein

"Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My maker was divine authority,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things were made,
And I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, ye who enter here."

-The Gates of Hell (From Dante's Inferno)

"Faith: not wanting to know what is true."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity."

-Albert Einstein

"There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God."

-Jean Rostand

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

-Galileo Galilei

"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science --or any honest intellectual inquiry."

-Stephen J. Gould

"The Vision of Christ that thou dost see,
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,
Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates."

-William Blake

"If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment."

-Voltaire

"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

"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."

-Arthur Shopenhauer

"Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction."

-Blaise Pascal

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

-Robert Frost

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven."

-William Shakespeare

"Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there."

-Mohammed Neguib

"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."

-Albert Einstein

"Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million."

-Mark Twain

"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer."

-Saddi

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

-Voltaire

"What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"An honest god is the noblest work of man."

-Robert G. Ingersoll

"I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. ... In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds."

-Albert Einstein