Best 8213 quotes in «religion quotes» category

Siempre he creído que una persona es inteligente. Son las multitudes las que son estúpidas. Y pocas cosas confirman esto mejor que la guerra, la religion organizada, la burocracia y la preparatoria, donde la mayoria reina sin piedad. Cuando recordé mis primeros dias ahí, todo lo que ví fue una inseguridade y una duda tan agobiantes que un simple grano era capaz de sacar mi vida de balance. Sólo hasta mis últimos dias tuve confianza y respeto por mi mísmo, incluso un poco de individualid.

Shukladhyan (internal state that renders the constant awareness of ‘I am pure Soul’) is the direct cause for moksha (liberation). Dharmadhyan (absence of adverse internal state of being that hurts the self and others) is the indirect cause for moksha. Artadhyan (adverse internal state that results in hurting the self) is a cause for a birth in animal life form (non-human). Raudradhyan (Adverse internal state of being that hurts others) is a cause for a life in hell.

Sich mit diesem oder jenem zu identifizieren, ist also ein normaler Vorgang. Gefährlich wird es, sobald eine einzige Identität bestimmend wird, sobald man nur noch Muslim ist oder Christ oder Deutscher, Iraner oder meinetwegen Anhänger eines bestimmten Fußballclubs oder eines Popstars. Dann wird aus der pragmatischen Einschränkung, die jede Art von Identifizierung bedeutet, eine reale Verstümmelung der Persönlichkeit.

Silence brings answers; you just have to listen.  So I listened.  And it’s not sounds as most people think, listening can be feelings, sights, smells.  Listening is receiving just like all the other senses; you just have to be open.” Excerpt From: Marcus A. Nelson. “ Born from Weeds & Rats .” iBooks.

S'il n'existait pas Dieu il faudrait l'inventer." (If God did not exist he would have to be invented.)

Silence brings answers; you just have to listen.  So I listened.  And it’s not sounds as most people think, listening can be feelings, sights, smells.  Listening is receiving just like all the other senses; you just have to be open.” Excerpt From: Born from Weeds & Rats

Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.

Si me convierto será porque es preferible que muera un creyente a que lo haga un ateo.

Simon, you gave me no water to wash my feet, but this woman as washed them with her tears. You gave me no kiss, but she has not ceased to kiss my feet. Do no reproach her Simon for you did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed me for my burial.

Since living is believing, no one can be completely lacking in faith.

Since one could virtually open the Bible to any page and likely find something that speaks to his particular situation, is it fair to attribute this to the voice of God? After all, the Bible is not the only relevant book in existence. There are other religions with other scriptural texts which could do the same job. In fact, the text need not even be “scriptural.” I could select Sartre’s “Existentialism and Humanism” off the shelf, randomly flip to any page, and likely find something applicable to my life. Does this mean God is speaking through the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, a man who was by no means considered a friend to Christian thought? If the answer is yes, then who really needs to read the Bible? If this God is capable of turning anything into his “word” at any time, then you could theoretically receive a message from him in your Alpha-Bits.

Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France seems to have realised that books are its real enemies.

Since then your sere Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen." (Reply to the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521)

Sin is a shameful act.

Sin, on the contrary, is the pursuit of legitimate self-regarding interests at the expense of the neighbor, by spending our time and talents figuring out ways of exploiting them.

Sin will take you where you didn't plan to go. It will keep you there longer than you planned to stay. And it will cost you more than you intended to pay

Sin contaminates our lives. Holiness purifies our lives.

Si nos deja es para preparar, también un día, nuestra llegada al reino del Señor, para que seamos acogidos con esmero. No imaginé a mi padre con el empeño de prepararme una acogedora llegada al Cielo, ¿me dejaría allí ducharme sin gritarme que cerrara el grifo de una maldita vez? Me costaba imaginar el reencuentro del que hablaba el sacerdote. Como mucho mi padre me aguardaría con su oportuno te lo dije.

Si on ne fait pas violence aux textes, on fait violence aux hommes.

Sin religión alguna de una Divinidad, jamás los hombres en nación se concertaron; y así comode cosas físicas, o sea de los movimientos de los cuerpos, no cabeciencia segura sin la guía de las verdades abstractas de la matemática, así no cabe en las cosas morales sin el aprecio de las verdades abstractas de la metafísica, y por tanto sin la demostración de Dios.

Si vous m'accordez que l'homme a une âme - je veux que les bêtes en aient, toutes les bêtes - à commencer par le pourceau pour finir à la fourmi, aux animaux microscopiques. Si l'homme est libre les animaux sont libres, ils seront comme lui récompensés ou punis, que d'âmes diverses, que d'enfers, que de paradis eût dit Voltaire - cette réflexion est humiliante - elle conduit au matérialisme et au nihilisme. (If you grant me that man has a soul, I like to think that animals have souls, too-all animals, from the pig to the ant, even the microscopic animals. If man is free, animals are free; like him they will be rewarded or punished. So many different souls, so many hells, so many heavens, Voltaire would have said. This reflection is humiliating. It leads to materialism or to nihilism.)

Slow down. The Taliban were religious, in the sense that in their opinion a being called Allah really designed and created the world and everything in it, including them. They were also a cultus in that they believed that you should pray five times a day, study the Koran, fast during Ramadan, give a tenth of your income to the poor and visit Mecca at least once in your lifetime. It is a matter of record that they had the ancient statues at Bamyan destroyed. But Professor, who put up the statues? Buddhist monks, that's who. Possibly the monks were not religious, in the sense that they didn't believe in a designer-God but they were certainly part of a cultus and they had lots and lots of supernatural beliefs which you would think were Bad Things. So what you should have said is "Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues. Imagine no ancient statues for the Taliban to blow up." This is absolutely emblematic of your confused attitude. When a religious organisation does something which annoys you, you take it for granted that it was Caused By Religion. But when a religious organisation does something which you quite like you don't think that "religion" had anything to do with it. You hardly spot that there was any religion involved at all.

Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer.

Smiling is not a choice It’s a Lifestyle Pass it on

Soar on to the King, the crown jewel, And then you'll truly see That nothing is as beautiful As His grand Majesty.

So," Art [Green] said, "it's hard to do Judaism and travel light. Judaism is not mostly about letting go, but mostly about attachment to God, through attachment to tradition, attachment to forms.

Social institutions assume a character which may almost be called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Like the celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards.

So far as I personally am concerned I had better state that I feel as little entitled to assert as to deny the existence of what others call God, for I must admit that I just do not know what this word is supposed to mean. I certainly reject every anthropomorphic, personal or animistic interpretation of the term, interpretations through which many people succeed in giving it a meaning. The conception of a man-like or mind-like acting being appears to me rather the product of an arrogant overestimation of the capacities of a man-like mind. [...] I long hesitated whether to insert this personal note here, but ultimately decided to do so because support by a professed agnostic may help religious people more unhesitatingly to pursue that conclusions that we do share. Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive.

Socrates poisoned, Aristides ostracized, Aristotle fleeing for his life, Jesus crucified, Paul beheaded, Peter crucified head downward, Savonarola martyred, Spinoza hunted, tracked and cursed, and an order issued that no man should speak to him not supply him food or shelter, Bruno burned, Galileo imprisoned, Huss, Wyclif, Latimer and Tyndale used for kindling - all this in the name of religion, institutional religion, the one thing that has caused more misery, heartaches, bloodshed, war, than all other causes combined.

Society, in fact, often holds it to be a virtue to adhere to certain beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary. Belief in that which reason denies is associated with steadfastness and courage, while skepticism is often identified with cynicism and weak character. The more persuasive the evidence against a belief, the more virtuous it is deemed to persist in it. We honor faith. Faith can be a positive force, enabling people to persevere in the face of daunting odds, but the line between perseverance and fanaticism is perilously thin. Carried to extremes, faith becomes destructive—the residents of Jonestown for example, or the Heaven’s Gate cult. In both cases, the faith of the believers was tested; in both cases, they passed the test.

So I drink just one more glass to get me through the night; I look at my lamp, my fan, all the pictures and posted on my wall and I know I have failed again. I have left things left unsaid, undone, unseen. With only my dreams to guide me. If I knew my greatest sins were behind me, and not only something I felt, I would feel safe alone in my flawed arms, hoping to touch something purer and lovelier than me, so I think of you. I know what hopes are left to you, I know what pressure they bring and I still feel them because if anything hopes are wasteless. They are the infinite until we become the finite. I know I should not be scared of them, I know that they could be false, but dreams themselves are only false when the individual is false. I am false. I am hope. I am all the things I wish I could be but never see. So I see you, beautiful, long black hair, I say: God let this all be for something. And you sit there with your brown questioning eyes, you smile and I think again: God let this all be for something.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

So I do not pray. I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny. It seems to me that I have been given a mind and will power for that very purpose.

So here is what I see when we reclaim the church ladies: a woman loved and free is beautiful. She is laughing with her sisters, and together they are telling their stories, revealing their scars and their wounds, the places where they don't have it figured out. They are nurturers, creating a haven where the young, the broken, the tenderhearted, and the at-risk can flourish. These women are dancing and worshiping, hands high, faces tipped toward heaven, tears streaming. They are celebrating all shapes and sizes, talking frankly and respectfully about sexuality and body image, promising to stop calling themselves fat. They are saving babies tossed in rubbish heaps, rescuing child soldiers, supporting mamas trying to make ends meet halfway around the world, thinking of justice when they buy their daily coffee. They are fighting sex trafficking. They are pastoring and counseling. They are choosing life consistently, building hope, doing the hard work of transformation in themselves. They are shaking off the silence of shame and throwing open the prison doors of physical and sexual abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and suicidal depression. Poverty and despair are being unlocked - these women know there are many hands helping turn that key. There isn't much complaining about husbands and chores, cattiness, or jealousy when a woman knows she is loved for her true self. She is lit up with something bigger than what the world offers, refusing to be intimidated into silence or despair.

Solange Gott ein Mann ist, nicht ein Paar, kann das Leben einer Frau, nur so bleiben wie es heute ist, nämlich erbärmlich, die Frau als Proletarier der Schöpfung, wenn auch noch so elegant verkleidet.

So it was that I justified my morals and ethics. Everything became relative.

So, in accepting the New Age teachings in the 1960s, had I somehow accepted the very religion that had frightened me so much as a child?

So in a man’s mind, he appraises, negotiates, defines, delineates, weighs the information, and that includes God. As you can see, this is a relationship of management, not trust. You don’t trust things you can manage, you manage them. And so, God as information is managed and no relationship of trust is fostered.

So in this chapter, God threatened to kill everyone twice, but settled for killing 14,959 in three separate killing events. But don't complain about it or he'll kill you, too.

Sólo podéis ser independientes de Dios mientras conservéis la juventud y la prosperidad; la independencia no os llevará a salvo hasta el final.

So many ruins bear witness to good intentions which went astray, good intentions unenlightened by any glimmer of wisdom. To bring religion to the people is a fine and necessary undertaking, but this is not a situation in which the proposed end can be said to justify the means. The further people have drifted from the truth, the greater is the temptation to water down the truth, glossing over its less palatable aspects and, in short, allowing a policy of compromise to become one of adulteration. In this way it is hoped that the common man – if he can be found – will be encouraged to find a small corner in his busy life for religion without having to change his ways or to grapple with disturbing thoughts. It is a forlorn hope. Standing, as it were, at the pavement’s edge with his tray of goods, the priest reduces the price until he is offering his wares for nothing: divine judgement is a myth, hell a wicked superstition, prayer less important than decent behaviour, and God himself dispensable in the last resort; and still the passers-by go their way, sorry over having to ignore such a nice man but with more important matters demanding their attention. And yet these matters with which they are most urgently concerned are, for so many of them, quicksands in which they feel themselves trapped. Had they been offered a real alternative, a rock firm-planted from the beginning of time, they might have been prepared to pay a high price.

Some beliefs are so strongly held that some believers are ready to lose their heads rather than the belief they carry therein

Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell.

Some abusers organise themselves in groups to abuse children and other adults in a more formally ritualised way. Men and women in these groups can be abusers with both sexes involved in all aspects of the abuse. Children are often forced to abuse other children. Pornography and prostitution are sometimes part of the abuse as is the use of drugs, hypnotism and mind control. Some groups use complex rituals to terrify, silence and convince victims of the tremendous power of the abusers. the purpose is to gain and maintain power over the child in order to exploit. Some groups are so highly organised that they also have links internationally through trade in child-pornography, drugs and arms. Some abusers organise themselves around a religion or faith and the teaching and training of the children within this faith, often takes the form of severe and sustained torture and abuse. Whether or not the adults within this type of group believe that what they are doing is, in some way 'right' is immaterial to the child on the receiving end of the 'teachings' and abuse.

Some churches, sects, cults or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.

Some days my mantra was I will stay in this marriage because I am a Christian and Christians stay, but other days, I thought: if the choices are Christianity or divorce then I will just have to embrace secular humanism because I am not even sure I believe any of this anymore and it is one thing to devote twenty minutes every morning to praying when you are not sure you believe anything anymore and it is another thing to organize your whole life around a marriage you don’t want to be in because a God who may or may not exist says let no man put asunder.

Some folks insist that believing in animal rights is like a religion. But religion asks followers to believe in things nobody can see, while animal rights advocates ask followers to see things nobody can believe.

Some marry because they are in love. Others marry to have sex ... without the guilt.

Some nonreligious people are disgruntled by the word "faith," feeling that it has no connection to them. But we all have faith. Broadly speaking, "faith" does not apply only to belief in the supernatural. We have faith in our life, for example, believing we will live to see tomorrow, or in our health, believing we have years of healthy life ahead of us. Husbands and wives, parents and children have faith in one another.

Some of the simplest of truths are also some of the most difficult of truths, but such is Christianity: 'If it's not about Christ, it's not about life.