Quotes about religion

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

— Louis Aragon

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

— Matthew Arnold

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

— Mikhail Bakunin

And lips say God be pitiful, who never said, God be praised.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.

— Edmund Burke

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day...

— Lord Byron

If religion is only human, and its form is man's form, it follows that everything in religion is true.

— Emile-Auguste Chartier

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; -- nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Religion! what treasure untold resides in that heavenly word!

— William Cowper

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

— Benjamin Disraeli

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

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.

— Ludwig Feuerbach

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.

— Sigmund Freud

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

— Northrop Frye

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

Religion I have disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give to them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had that and I had not given them one cent, they would be rich. If they have not that, and I had given them the world, they would be poor.

— Patrick Henry

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.

— Alexander Herzen

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.

— Edward Hoagland

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.

— Thomas Hobbes

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Bob Hope

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

— Elbert Hubbard

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.

— Victor Hugo

Toleration is the best religion.

— Victor Hugo

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

— Aldous Huxley

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

— Dean William R. Inge

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.

— William James

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

— Karl Kraus

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

— Suzanne Lafollette

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

— D. H. Lawrence

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.

— C. S. Lewis

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

— Joseph De Maistre

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

— Christopher Marlowe

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?

— Harriet Martineau

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

— Harriet Martineau

Religion is the opium of the masses.

— Karl Marx

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

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it ought to be treated as a common enemy.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

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

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.

— Cardinal J. Newman

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.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.

— Sean O'Casey

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

— Thomas Paine

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.

— Thomas Paine

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

— Blaise Pascal

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

— Ezra Pound

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

— Chinese Proverb

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

— Edgar Quinet

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.

— Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

— Salman Rushdie

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

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

— Marquis De Sade

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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.

— George Bernard Shaw

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.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

— Susan Sontag

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.

— Paul Tillich

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.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

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.

— Mark Twain

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.

— Mark Twain

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

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

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

— John Updike

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

— Beatrice Potter Webb

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

— Oscar Wilde

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it's glories.

— Brigham Young

Hell is not punishment, neither is heaven reward, it is consequence

— Onwuka Emeka

If all that seperates me from my destiny is time, as i get older i get closer

— Onwuka Emeka

Humanity is the crime, God is the criminal.

— Kedar Joshi

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

— richard john neuhaus

God tells every religion that it is His favorite.

— Michael Lipsey

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

— Edgar Allan Poe

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.

— Laurence J. Peter

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

— Mark Twain

Information collect on the subject of religion is worthless. Religion is, to the very end, something that you must verify for yourself through actual practice.

— Morinaga Soko

Your daily life is your temple and religion.

— Kahlil Gibran

Religion is not so much a vehicle to God, as it is a buffer against the harshness of the brilliance of the purity of God.

— Leslie Miklosy

We need less freedom of religion and more freedom from religion!

— Kwende Madu

Science is the true religion. Reason is the only GOD!

— Kwende Madu

All world-religions are the mirror of the One Face. In them shines the One Light.

— Dada J.P. Vaswani

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod the high untrespassed sanctity if space, put out my hand and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee

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

— Ambrose Bierce

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson