Religion

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. ~~ G. K. Chesterton

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake … of searching and experimenting … of saying No to any authority--literary, artistic, philosophical, religious, social, and even political. ~~ Ignazio Silone

I'm not into religion, but I have a good grasp on my spirituality. I just believe that I'm not the greatest power on this earth. I didn't create myself, because I would have done a hell of a better job. ~~ Layne Staley

There are three modes of bearing the ills of life: by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion. ~~ Charles Caleb Colton

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. ~~ Dave Barry [Dave Barry Turns 50]

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start a new religion. ~~ L. Ron Hubbard

What has been the effect of religious coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

Religion indeed enlightens, terrifies, subdues; it gives faith, it inflicts remorse, it inspires resolutions, it draws tears, it inflames devotion, but only for the occasion. ~~ John Henry (Cardinal) Newman

It is a very rare church indeed that encourages its members to think for themselves in religious matters, or even tolerates this, and in most of them the clergy are quite ready to lay down the law in other fields too. ~~ Anne Roe

For countless ages the sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the stars shone in the Milky Way; but it was only with the coming of man that these things were understood. Man has unveiled secrets which might have been thought undiscoverable. Much has been achieved in the realm of art, science, literature, and religion. Is all this to end because so few are able to think of man rather than of this or that group of men? ~~ U Thant

What matters ultimately in the culture wars is what we do in our daily lives--not the big statements that we broadcast to the world at large, but the small messages we send through our families and our neighborhoods and our communities… The future will depend not so much on the movers and shakers in the centers of power, but on the hopes that we generate in our own communities, our schools, our churches, synagogues, and families. ~~ Michael Medved [The Devaluing of America]

In all religiousness there lurks the suspicion that we invented the story that God loves us. ~~ Sebastian Moore

Movies have mirrored our moods and myths since the century began. They have taken on some of the work of religion. ~~ Jennifer Stone

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride. ~~ H. L. Mencken

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. ~~ Aldous Huxley

Some people use religion like a bus. They ride on it only while it is going their way. ~~ Joe Moore

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile. ~~ W. A. Sunday

All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife … Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself, and never mind the rest. ~~ Beatrix Potter

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power. ~~ Benazir Bhutto

For there are as many interpretations of the Word of God as there are religions upon the face of the earth. And none can tell you the separate truth that lies only within your soul. ~~ Glenn Kleier

In some ways, religion is to spirituality as ideology is to thought. ~~ Arnold Rampersad

Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics. ~~ Wendell Phillips

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~~ Blaise Pascal

So natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. ~~ John Stuart Mill

Money can be more of a barrier between people than language or race or religion. ~~ Vera Caspary

In the future, I predict the word "minorities" will become obsolete. As today's world grows ever more fragmented, with so many races and religions, we will come to realize we're ALL part of some minority of one sort or another. For, if the human race is to survive and fulfill its destiny, we must finally accept the fact that diversity is part of humanity's heritage--and every so-called "minority" has its essential place in the Creator's master plan. ~~ Stan Lee

It is hard for many people today to make the distinction between religion and religiosity, the latter a dangerous parody of the former. ~~ Abigail McCarthy

We do not want churches. They will teach us to quarrel about God. ~~ Chief Joseph

We contrive to make revenge itself look like religion. We call down thunder on many a head under pretense, that those on whom we invoke it are God's enemies, when perhaps we invoke it because they are ours. ~~ Hannah More [Practical Piety]

Patriotism, public opinion, parental duty, discipline, religion, morality, are only fine names for intimidation. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

At the Harvest Festival in church the area behind the pulpit was piled high with tins of fruit for the old-age pensioners. We had collected the tinned fruit from door to door. Most of it came from old-age pensioners. ~~ Clive James

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. ~~ Voltaire

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

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. ~~ Sir Richard F. Burton

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart. ~~ Walter Lippman

You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows! But it's not. It's wings! Wings! ~~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher [Bonfire]

I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. ~~ Jawaharlal Nehru

My own mind is my own church. ~~ Thomas Paine

Often in history we see that religion, which was meant to raise us and make us better and nobler, has made people behave like beasts. Instead of bringing enlightenment of them, it has often tried to keep them in the dark; instead of broadening their minds, it has frequently made them narrow-minded and intolerant of others. ~~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the twentieth century. ~~ Malcolm Muggeridge

To learn the worth of a man's religion, do business with him. ~~ John Lancaster Spalding

The men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room. ~~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion. ~~ Wilhelm Stekel

To this very day, common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind. ~~ Dorothy Day

The religion of one seems madness unto another. ~~ Thomas Browne

The Church welcomes technological progress and receives it with love, for it is an indubitable fact that technological progress comes from God and, therefore, can and must lead to Him. ~~ Pope Pius XII

Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair. ~~ Edward Norman

Religion is perhaps its own worst enemy. For religion, masquerading under the guise of archaic creeds, and impossible literalisms, and ecclesiasticism indifferent to human needs, has brought about an inevitable and in many respects wholesome revulsion. ~~ Georgia Harkness [Conflicts in Religious Thought]

A good life is the only Religion. ~~ Thomas Fuller

The task of organized religion is not to prove that God was in the first century, but that he is in the twentieth. ~~ S. H. Miller

The use of religion, psychoanalysis, or the mass media, as instruments by which people are helped to adjust to a dehumanizing social order without being challenged to change it, is essentially a betrayal of man. ~~ Richard Shaull

To what excesses will men not go for the sake of a religion in which they believe so little and which they practice so imperfectly! ~~ Jean de La Bruyere

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy. ~~ Lyman Beecher

… every age thinks it is perfect, especially in religion. ~~ William Pickens

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. ~~ Albert Einstein

There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervious to change. ~~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Religions are kept alive by heresies, which are really sudden explosions of faith. Dead religions do not produce them. ~~ Gerald Brenan

All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking into the distance. ~~ Vasili Vasilievich Rozanov

All religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul. ~~ Carl G. Jung

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. ~~ Lenny Bruce

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters. ~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all. ~~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We consider bibles and religions divine--I do not say they are not divine.
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life. ~~ Walt Whitman

America is a religious nation, but only because it is religiously tolerant and lets every citizen pray, or not pray, in his own way. ~~ Unattributed

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. ~~ George Gurdjieff

The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn. ~~ Patricia Hampl

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

The government of the United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion. The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan nation. ~~ Treaty with Tripoli

I don't see why religion and science can't cooperate. What's wrong with using a computer to count our blessings? ~~ Unattributed

We have to build our churches in our hearts. ~~ Stevie Wonder

Faith is not making religious-sounding noises in the daytime. It is asking your inmost self questions at night--and then getting up and going to work. ~~ Mary Jean Irion [Yes, World]

Most people have some sort of religion. At least they know which church they're staying away from. ~~ John Erskine

Religion is the most widely debated and least agreed upon phenomenon of human history. ~~ Georgia Harkness

A little knowledge and an over-abundance of zeal always tends to be harmful. In the area involving religious truths, it can be disastrous. ~~ Kathryn Kuhlman

I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means. ~~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him. ~~ Walter Savage Landor

Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their … pretensions to be the only religious people. ~~ Jean Guehenno

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful. ~~ Margaret Mead

God is easy to find because He's everywhere. But mostly…God is within. And that's where it's best to look for Him. In one's own personal temple. The church of the self. ~~ Glenn Kleier

Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists. ~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Religion… has hardened their hearts and made it impossible for them to see, except through the dark glass of their own creed, what life is or ought to be. ~~ Pearl S. Buck [Fighting Angel]

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 … or change. ~~ Stephen King [The Stand]

Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? ~~ Annie Dillard [Teaching a Stone to Talk]

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it. ~~ John Dewey

Leave the matter of religion to the family… the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the Church and the State forever separate. ~~ Ulysses S. Grant

In the name of religion many great and fine deeds have been performed. In the name of religion also, thousands and millions have been killed, and every possible crime has been committed. ~~ Jawaharlal Nehru (see Said Who?)

God looks after the big stuff--or Nature does, if you're not religious. Nature can look after Niagara Falls, the Antarctic, and Space. What we can look after are tiny details. ~~ Pete Townshend

The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man which it forms. If it injures the intelligence, it is bad; if it injures the character, it is vicious; if it injures the conscience it is criminal. ~~ Henri Amiel

Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it. ~~ Charles C. Colton

Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others. ~~ William O. Douglas

Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion. ~~ T. S. Eliot

A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night. ~~ Thomas Macaulay

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

Science and religion, religion and science, put it as I may, they are two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two, focusing together, reveal the truth. ~~ Pearl S. Buck

Politics and religion mixed is the headiest cocktail ever invented. That it is a mixture cannot, I fear, be controverted. It is very, very old. ~~ Norah Bentinck

[Prediction for the next millennium:] That isolated beaches, mountain summits, lonesome valleys and great prairies will replace man-made churches as gathering places for worship and Godly communication. ~~ Sir James R. Mancham

His religion at best is an anxious wish--like that of Rebelais, a great Perhaps. ~~ Thomas Carlyle

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham. ~~ Anna Sewell [Black Beauty]

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety. ~~ Edmund Burke

Much of what passes for religious faith today amounts to a side bet, covering a vague belief that "there must be something" or that man needs to believe (especially when in foxholes. ~~ Herbert J. Muller

The various religions are like different roads converging on the same point. What difference does it make if we follow different routes, provided we arrive at the same destination. ~~ Mahatma Gandhi

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: the mad daughter of a wise mother. ~~ Voltaire

The very weird religion of celebrity scares me. It's like people are creating fake heroes because they don't have any real ones. The politicians have failed us, religion has failed us, so who do people turn to? Celebrities. It's wrong. ~~ Michael Stipe

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was just thinking, if it is really religion with these nudist colonies, they sure must turn atheists in the wintertime. ~~ Will Rogers

One's religion is whatever he is most interested in, and yours is Success. ~~ Sir J. M. Barrie

When Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well. ~~ Lily Dougall

When believers and unbelievers live in the same manner--I distrust the religion. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. ~~ Bertrand Russell

What makes a cult a cult is not its religion, whatever it is, but the practice of mind-control techniques, usually by a charismatic leader, that robs its members of their "independence of thought." ~~ Frank Rich

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion--except for the sect that can win political power. ~~ Robert H. Jackson

It were better to be of no church, than to be bitter for any. ~~ William Penn

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions, and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them, nor all they have suffered to enrich us. ~~ Marcel Proust

True religion is no more and no less than the relationship between man and his God. ~~ Grace Coolidge

The main thing today is shopping. Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do … he'd go to church, start a revolution--SOMETHING. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? … Go shopping. ~~ Arthur Miller

It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language. ~~ George Santayana

Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instinct, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit. ~~ Charles Darwin

The only religious way to think of death is as a part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life. ~~ Thomas Mann

I've not yet found a way to express my faith within the form of religious observance, but I know that my faith is what I stand on, what I'm going for. ~~ John Denver

How absurd to try to make two men think alike on matters of religion, when I cannot make two timepieces agree! ~~ Charles V

In vain I have summoned philosophy, its aid in vain. Come then Religion thy force can alone support the mind under the severest conflicts human nature is subject to. ~~ Abigail Adams

There must be religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as there is art for art's sake… the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, nor to what is good, nor to what is holy; it leads only to itself. ~~ Victor Cousin

In the time of their demise, it has been characteristic of all peoples that they have surrendered to pressures put upon them by their power-mad leaders, by their insane religions and by their misguided philosophies, to conform. ~~ Robert M. Lindner

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. ~~ George Santayana

"Important if true." Inscription which Kinglake wanted on all churches. ~~ Geoffrey Madan

I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God. ~~ William Somerset Maugham

When all men are what they pretend to be, jails will be torn down, churches turned into storehouses, and policemen will be cab drivers. ~~ William C. Hunter

Our banking system grew by accident; and whenever something happens by accident, it becomes a religion. ~~ Walter Wriston

To be patriotic, hate all nations but your own; to be religious, all sects but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own. ~~ Lionel Strachey