Best Quotes About Religious (Top 100)
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Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.
Garrison Keillor
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Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
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America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln
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Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.
Dan Brown
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Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Epicurus
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A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.
Frank Zappa
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It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
Voltaire
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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
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The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Richard Dawkins
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Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
Philip K. Dick
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I don't want to believe. I want to know.
Carl Sagan
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God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does.
Martin Luther
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Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.
Dan Brown
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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
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No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
Elie Wiesel
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I think the reason we sometimes have the false sense that God is so far away is because that is where we have put him. We have kept him at a distance, and then when we are in need and call on him in prayer, we wonder where he is. He is exactly where we left him.
Ravi Zacharias
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After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
Francis of Assisi
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You are never dedicated to do something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
Eckhart Tolle
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It is not earthly rank, nor birth, nor nationality, nor religious privilege, which proves that we are members of the family of God; it is love, a love that embraces all humanity.
Ellen G. White
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We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathan Swift
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God, send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. And sever any tie in my heart except the tie that binds my heart to Yours.
David Livingstone
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A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.
John Calvin
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Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.
Voltaire
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The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.
Stephen King
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If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy.
Fulton J. Sheen
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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.
Karl Marx
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Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries — slave of prejudice " slave of religious fanaticism " slave of barbarity and inhumanity.
Saadat Hasan Manto
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Although my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.
John Newton
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Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
John Adams
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Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.
Timothy Leary
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The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.
Julian of Norwich
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We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
Simone Weil
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Religious people fear hell — Spiritual people have walked thru it.
Frank Warren
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Use me, God. Show me how to take who I am, who I want to be, and what I can do, and use it for a purpose greater than myself.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Gerry Spence
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We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say "common struggle" because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination.
Coretta Scott King
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Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of Men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a Special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom.
Benjamin Rush
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A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
Abigail Van Buren
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There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!
Abraham Kuyper
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The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.
Thomas Szasz
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Because with every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth.
Rob Bell
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Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
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We need to promote greater tolerance and understanding among the peoples of the world. Nothing can be more dangerous to our efforts to build peace and development than a world divided along religious, ethnic or cultural lines. In each nation, and among all nations, we must work to promote unity based on our shared humanity.
Kofi Annan
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The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
Richard Dawkins
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People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
Dave Barry
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All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards thier goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singlenee of purpose could have given focus to thier genius, would have kept them in the groove of purpose. Mania ... is as priceless as genius.
Ian Fleming
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Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
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My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being.
John Coltrane
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I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
Shelley Winters
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Faith, mighty faith, the promise sees, And looks to God alone; Laughs at impossibilities, And cries it shall be done.
Charles Wesley
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If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.
Evelyn Underhill
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Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.
Idries Shah
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We are vanishing from the earth, yet I cannot think we are useless or else Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each.
Geronimo
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What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
Albert Einstein
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If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.
William Law
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Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
James D. Watson
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Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.
Dennis Prager
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This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.
William Law
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It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.
Loren Eiseley
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The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Sigmund Freud
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Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of KNOWING Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.
Brennan Manning
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The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Notorious sinners didn't kill Jesus. Religious people did.
Judah Smith
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In regards to this great Book [the Bible], I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are found portrayed in it.
Abraham Lincoln
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I hope I never get so old I get religious.
Ingmar Bergman
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We often can't see what God is doing in our lives, but God sees the whole picture and His plan for us clearly.
Tony Dungy
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The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
John Quincy Adams
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The only foundation for . . . a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.
Benjamin Rush
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All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Oh Lord, may I be directed what to do and what to leave undone.
Elizabeth Fry
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No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
Annie Besant
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A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism.
Dion Fortune
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We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.
John Adams
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God will not permit any troubles to come upon us, unless He has a specific plan by which great blessing can come out of the difficulty.
Peter Marshall
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Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.
Isaiah Berlin
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[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
Jared Diamond
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My prayer today is that we will feel the loving arms of God wrapped around us, and will know in our hearts that He will never forsake us as we trust in Him.
Billy Graham
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The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
Thomas Jefferson
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I am a deeply religious nonbeliever - this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
Albert Einstein
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Your national greatness, swelling vanity; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
Frederick Douglass
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Starbucks says they are going to start putting religious quotes on cups. The very first one will say, 'Jesus! This cup is expensive!'
Conan O'Brien
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If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.
Jack Vance
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One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
Steven Weinberg
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Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
Paul Hawken
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It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Albert Einstein
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Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.
Federico Fellini
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The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Albert Einstein
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Afflictions are light when compared with what we really deserve. They are light when compared with the sufferings of the Lord Jesus. But perhaps their real lightness is best seen by comparing them with the weight of glory which is awaiting us.
Arthur W. Pink
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Fascism is not an article for export.
Benito Mussolini
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An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.
David James Duncan
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And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.
Karen Armstrong
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Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.
Euripides
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Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
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The amount of things I have been through and the remarkable ways in which the body has reacted is just phenomenal. No wonder I became religious, because you don't know why something's happening to you and you don't know how you bounced back.
Amitabh Bachchan
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Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.
Kathleen Blanco
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I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming master of his fate and captain of his soul.
Jawaharlal Nehru
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I have a friend or had a friend, now dead Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it" and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
Even More Religious Quotes
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If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.
Pope John Paul I
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Hate your next-door neighbor, but don't forget to say grace.
Barry McGuire
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When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people - especially the ripsnorting sinners - so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.
Catherine Marshall
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A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
Albert Einstein
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All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.
Dalai Lama
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I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
Albert Einstein
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We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.
Kathleen Norris
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Consider Christmas - could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating - all in the name of the lowly Jesus?
Upton Sinclair
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While travelling near Tampa, Florida I passed the "Jehovah's Witness Assembly Hall" and was struck by the fact that that must be where they make them.
Gene Spafford
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Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
A. Philip Randolph
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Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.
Dinesh D'Souza
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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
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Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.
Clive Bell
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Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross
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Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.
Abdolkarim Soroush
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Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.
Bill Maher
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Let's not leave an educational vacuum to be filled by religious extremists who go to families who have no other option and offer meals, housing and some form of education. If we are going to combat extremism then we must educate those very same children.
Hillary Clinton
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I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
Rita Rudner
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Hell is paved with infants skulls.
Richard Baxter
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It is time for the government of China to stop holding innocent religious figures in captivity merely for peacefully protesting China's occupation of Tibet.
Sam Brownback
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I love God, and when you get to know Him, you find He's a Livin' Doll.
Jane Russell
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To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.
Paul Ricoeur
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This story is true. Of course, there are many lies therein and most of it did not happen, but it's all true. In that sense it is deeply religious, perhaps even biblical.
Craig Ferguson
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The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.
Robert Bork
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Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
Rowan Williams
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Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
Ignazio Silone
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Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like.
William Law
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These figures emphasize how soft people's commitment to God is. Americans are willing to expend some energy in religious activities such as attending church and reading the Bible, and they are willing to throw some money in the offering basket, but when it comes time to truly establishing their priorities and making a tangible commitment to knowing and loving God, most people stop short.
George Barna
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From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people.
Howard Dean
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It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.
Oprah Winfrey
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All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.
William Law
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Belief is truth held in the mind; faith is a fire in the heart.
Joseph Fort Newton
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The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
Samuel Butler
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The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves - our weakness, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all.
Tryon Edwards
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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.
Gerard De Nerval
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The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion.
Lord Hailsham
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I'm not really religious but very spiritual. I give money to this company that manufactures hearing aids on a regular basis. More people should really hear me sing. I have a gift from God.
Christina Aguilera
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We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.
David Horowitz
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The sight of nature fascinates, the family tie has a sweet enchantment and patriotism gives the religious spirit a fiery devotion to the powers that it reveres.
Bruno Bauer
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The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
Dave Barry
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The concept of neutrality can lead to a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it.
Arthur Goldberg
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Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness.
Bill Griffith
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I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
Thomas Paine
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Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable—th e rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.
Rodney Stark
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The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.
John Jay Chapman
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The problem with Bush is that yes, he's religious in a fundamentalist sort of way, they read the Old Testament as a sort of charter for the chosen people to do what they like.
Bruce Kent
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America's real plan is to fuel a civil war, while the national plan is for all Lebanese to live in peace with one another. There will be no return to civil war. All the political powers as well as the media must work to reduce religious tensions and make everyone understand that they will not allow Lebanon to be destroyed again.
Hassan Nasrallah
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This doesn't mean that they commit themselves to the view that this is all there is. Many scientists (including me) think that this is the case, but other scientists are religious, and believe that what is observed in nature is at least in part a result of God's will.
Steven Weinberg
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Remarkable is the greater openness of the Catholic Church towards people of other religious traditions and persuasions. The development has not been without problems, since some people have resisted it and others have pushed openness beyond the desirable point.
Francis Arinze
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God sweetens outward pain with inward peace.
Thomas Watson
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Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of his religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
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The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?
Christopher Hampton
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By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.
Albert Schweitzer
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I believe that religious faith schools are highly dubious.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
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When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!
David Starr Jordan
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I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Igor Stravinsky
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A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
Jessamyn West
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If there ever was a religious war full of terror, it was the crusades. But you can't blame Christianity because a few adventurers did this. That's my message.
Moustapha Akkad
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You talk to God, you're religious. God talks to you, you're psychotic.
Doris Egan
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Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.
William Law
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Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.
Paul Tillich
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The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.
Emily Carr
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The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
Emma Goldman
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Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul," he told them. "So we will start with these studies.
Greg Mortenson
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Religions are vague, of course. This means that they are easy to follow -you can interpret their prescriptions as you like. but it also means that it is easy to slip up -there is always some injunction you are violating. But Islam has no religious establishment - no popes, no bishops - that can declare by fiat which is the correct interpretation. As a result, the decision to oppose the state on the grounds that is insufficiently Islamic belongs to anyone who wishes to exercise it.
Fareed Zakaria
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What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
William Law
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Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.
James Hogg
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A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.
Alexander Cockburn
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There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.
Van Wyck Brooks
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We should not run away from religious teachings. We should run to them.
James Carville
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We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell.
Karl Popper
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All my life I have made it a rule never to permit a religious man or woman take for granted that his or her religious beliefs deserved more consideration than non-religious beliefs or anti-religious ones. I never agree with that foolish statement that I ought to respect the views of others when I believe them to be wrong.
Chapman Cohen
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We've never been a religious band, but the media wants us to be.
Amy Lee
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If you can impress any man with an absorbing conviction of the supreme importance of some moral or religious doctrine; if you can make him believe that those who reject that doctrine are doomed to eternal perdition; if you then give that man power, and by means of his ignorance blind him to the ulterior consequences of his own act,-he will infallibly persecute those who deny his doctrine.
Henry Thomas Buckle
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One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.
Charles Stross
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That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships-although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.
Rodney Stark
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The story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas gave a moral and religious rationale to anti-Jewish sentiment, and that's what made it persistent and vicious.
Elaine Pagels
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The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn't invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life.
James P. Hogan
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If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Albert Einstein
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So the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.
Mike Mason
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Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
Chapman Cohen
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There is no real religious experience that does not express itself in charity.
C. H. Dodd
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I'm religious. I think this is something God had planned for me.
Clay Aiken
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An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt.
Antonio Tabucchi
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Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics.
Mary Daly
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The liberty of the Press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman.
Junius
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The greatest saint in the world is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice. It is he who is most thankful to God.
William Law
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And also a lot of Muslims are no more religious then the average Swede. For them it's natural that human rights come first.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
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Faith is the proper name of religious experience.
John Baillie
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Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man... , But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians - wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage.
Ron Reagan
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Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.
George Washington
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I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.
Al Purdy
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I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion. . . . I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste.
Georges Bizet
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Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass
Emma Goldman
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For those who may not find happiness to exercise religious faith, it's okay to remain a radical atheist; it's absolutely an individual right, but the important thing is with a compassionate heart - then no problem.
Dalai Lama
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Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
James Russell Lowell
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The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
Alan Watts
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As the wicked are hurt by the best things, so the godly are bettered by the worst.
William Jenkyn
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Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
James Madison
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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats
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A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation
Albert Einstein
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Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
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Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
Sigmund Freud
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It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics.
Denise Caruso
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From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a haze of changing colors. Actually, and in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place - full of old, dying people, who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America - full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religious cults and fake science, and wildcat enterprises, which, with their aim for quick profit, are doomed to collapse and drag down multitudes of people.
Louis Adamic
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My feeling is religious insofar as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature".
Albert Einstein
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William James
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Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us.
Josiah Royce
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The first sign of your becoming religious is that you are becoming cheerful
Swami Vivekananda
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The idea of legally establishing inalienable, inherent and sacred rights of the individual is not of political but religious origin.
George Jellinek
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The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.
William Penn
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I would describe my spirituality as exactly the opposite of having a religious affiliation.
Bill Maher
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The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.
Adolf Hitler
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To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when not well.
Samuel Johnson
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Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.
Dalai Lama
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If our life is not a course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.
William Law
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High ethics and religious principles form the basis for success and happiness in every area of life.
John Templeton
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We need less posturing and more genuine charisma. Charisma was originally a religious term, meaning "of the spirit" or "inspired." It's about letting God's light shine through us. It's about a sparkle in people that money can't buy. It's an invisible energy with visible effects. To let go, to just love, is not to fade into the wallpaper. Quite the contrary, it's when we truly become bright. We're letting our own light shine.
Marianne Williamson
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To believe in God is to yearn for His existence, and furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.
Miguel de Unamuno
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Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.
Howard Nemerov