Best 8213 quotes in «religion quotes» category

Apathy is the acceptance of the unacceptable.

... a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value.

Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.

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.

A religion contradicting science and a science contradicting religion are equally false.

A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb.

A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.

A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman.

A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time - the telling of what came first and before done forever.

A religion without mystery must be a religion without God.

A religion cannot be sustained by the number of its lip-followers denying in their lives its tenets.

A religion that gives nothing, costs nothing, and suffers nothing, is worth nothing.

Art is my God, Music is my religion.

As for our gods, we have a few too many to be true.

As for the Devil - that is somebody our religion tried to do without for a long time.

As for those who protest that I am robbing people of the great comfort and consolation they gain from Christianity, I can only say that Christianity includes hell, eternal torture for the vast majority of humanity, for most of your relatives and friends. . . . If I could feel that I had robbed anybody of his faith in hell, I should not be ashamed or regretful.

Ask for what you want, but be willing to take what God gives you. It may be better than what you asked for.

Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. There is no such thing.

As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Assuming the universe came from nothing, it is empty to begin with... Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.

As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

As the grace grows nearer my theology is growing strangely simple, and it begins and ends with Christ as the only Savior of the lost.

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this.

A theory is just a mathematical model to describe the observations.

Atheism is an effect of that knowledge [a poll showed atheists knew more about religion than anyone else], not a lack of knowledge. I gave a bible to my daughter. That is how you make atheists.

Atheism: the religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority.

Atheism is a religion the way abstinence is a sex position.

At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.

A stranger here Strange things doth meet, strange glories see; Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear, Strange all, and new to me. But that they mine should be, who nothing was, That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.

A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.

A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

At the end of the day, we should give thanks and pray, to the one, to the one.

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.

A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion.

Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom.

Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed?

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content.

A woman once said to me, 'Any religion that is to be any good to one must be one they make for themselves,' - and it is so. She, curiously, was a clergyman's wife.

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion...[has] divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

Because every day of your life was written on God's calendar before you were born, everything that happens to you has spiritual significance.