Religion Quotes

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

Jean Guehenno

Just as there is a lower carelessness which means death to the soul, so there is a higher carelessness which is the supreme gift of religion. We must all at length rest back upon God.

W. E. Orchard

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Jorge Luis Borges

Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.

Mark Twain

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, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Douglas Adams, Salmon of Doubt, 2002

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Albert Einstein

Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved and wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it, any more than there is in the grosser sin.

Horace Bushnell

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?

Carl Sagan

I am for freedom of religion, & against all maneuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1799

In the matter of religion, people eagerly fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and yours whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of humanity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

Sigmund Freud

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

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.

Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters".

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

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Frederick Buechne

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore De Balzac

Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

Thomas Hobbes

When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion.

Voltaire

Of all religions, Christianity is without a doubt the one that should inspire tolerance most, although, up to now, the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

Religion is the monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

William James

There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.

Reinhold Niebuh

Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Oscar Wilde

The truly religious man does not embrace a religion and he who embraces one has no religion.

Kahlil Gibran

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men... the master of superstition is the people and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reverse order.

Francis Bacon

We do not destroy religion by destroying superstition.

Cicero

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple the philosophy is kindness.

Dalai Lama

Cruel persecution and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essense of religion, namely, its absolute claims.

Morris Raphael Cohen

Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.

Franz Werfel

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.

Albert Einstein

The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.

Thomas Paine

Praising God is one of the highest and purest acts of religion. In prayer we act like men in praise we act like angels.

Thomas John Watson, Sr.

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

Oscar Wilde

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by... religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

Harvey Cox

There shall be no compulsion in religion.

Quran 2: 263, Quran 2: 263

The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self - Love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self - Absorption.

Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness