Best 8213 quotes in «religion quotes» category

Before one can correctly understand the work of the Holy Spirit, he must first of all know the Spirit himself. A frequent source of error and fanaticism about the work of the Holy Spirit is the attempt to study and understand His work without, first of all, coming to know Him as a person.

Before God could bring me to this place He has broken me a thousand times.

Belief in one God is the cornerstone of all religions.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.

Believing is easier than thinking; that's why there will always be more believers than thinkers. However, the results of god-belief are often far more mental trials than those of nonbelief. It is quite difficult to ascertain the wishes of an invisible being.

Believing would be easier if God would show himself by depositing a million dollars in a Swiss bank account in my name

Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.

Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one's religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep.

Beware of those who try to sell you simple answers to complex questions.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.

Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.

Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the way of the Sacramentarians, nor sat in the seat of the Zwinglians, nor followed the Council of the Zurichers.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.

Both magic and religion are based strictly on mythological tradition, and they also both exist in the atmosphere of the miraculous, in a constant revelation of their wonder-working power. They both are surrounded by taboos and observances which mark off their acts from those of the profane world.

Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, where Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.

Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.

But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judeo - Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself?

But he who never sins can little boast Compared to him who goes and sins no more!

...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.

But for my faith in God, I should have been a raving maniac.

But in the end all religions point to the same light. In between the light and us, sometimes there are too many rules. The light is here and there are no rules to follow this light.

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

But the argument is still unsound, because the first premise is false: there are other unmentioned alternatives, for example, that Jesus as described in the gospels is a legendary figure, so that the trilemma is false as it stands.

But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers.

But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

By giving away food we get more strength. By bestowing clothing on others we gain more beauty. By donating abodes of purity and truth we acquire great treasures.

By religion I mean perfected manhood,--the quickening of the soul by the influence of the Divine Spirit.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

By itself, 1 Corinthians 15 just wouldn't mean much. He wants the appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 to be read as if they had in parentheses after them 'See Luke 24; Matthew 28; John 21.'

By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.

Can the Lord forgive me? Got the spirit of a thug in me.

Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it -- that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and Mammon.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.

Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It's a painful religion. We're all gluttons for punishment.

Christ had given the apostles a world-wide commission, embracing all the nations; but intellectually they did not understand what He meant. They found that out as they followed the impulse of the Spirit.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him.