Motivational Quotes

Religion

My mom grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx and gave me an invaluable piece of advice for dealing with people in New York - if someoneÆs bugging you just act crazy. IÆve modified her approach somewhat. Public displays of religiosity work just as well as feigning psychosis.

- Waiter Rant

Best Quotes about Religion

It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.

Radhakrishnan, Sir Sarvepalli

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

Quinet, Edgar

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

Lewis, C. S.

Religion is like holding on to a rock in the middle of a raging river; faith is learning how to swim.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Proverb, Chinese

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

Shaw, George Bernard

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Pound, Ezra

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Arnold, Matthew

10.

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

11.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

James, William

13.

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.

Tillich, Paul

14.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

15.

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former -- of the corruption of the will.

Herzen, Alexander

16.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

Twain, Mark

17.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

Eric Hoffer

18.

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

Hoagland, Edward

19.

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.

Gurdjieff, George

20.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Martineau, Harriet

21.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Marx, Karl

22.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde

23.

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

24.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

H. L. Mencken

25.

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

Charles Lamb

26.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

Niebuhr, Reinhold

27.

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

Kraus, Karl

28.

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?

Martineau, Harriet

29.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Webb, Beatrice Potter

30.

Toleration is the best religion.

Hugo, Victor

31.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Bierce, Ambrose

32.

Waiter Rant

33.

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.

Hugo, Victor

34.

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction.

Ian McKellen

35.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without assistance.

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence.

Marlowe, Christopher

38.

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.

Nerval, Gerard De

39.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

Hobbes, Thomas

40.

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

James Feibleman

41.

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.

Feuerbach, Ludwig

42.

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

Carl Sandburg

43.

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.

Marx, Karl

44.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

Jane Austen

46.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

Lafollette, Suzanne

48.

I do benefits for all religions -- I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.

Hope, Bob

49.

A good test of a man's religion is its vitality.

50.

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