RELIGION QUOTES VII

quotations about religion

Actions inspired by fear of future punishment or hope of future reward are entirely selfish and unworthy of religion.

JAMES PLATT

Platt's Essays


Religion is like a knife. If you use it the wrong way you can cut yourself.

ERIC WEINER

The Geography of Bliss

Tags: Eric Weiner


A man whose religion is dominated by overhanging gloom or fear misrepresents religion as much as a cloudy day would misrepresent a sunshiny day, or as much as January would misrepresent June.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


Among its other faults, religion slows intellectual progress, promotes the acceptance of the implausible, and creates false general conceptions about reality -- all of which are harmful to progression in society.

MICHAEL HUEMER

"Is religion good or bad for society? Two experts debate", Catholic News Agency, February 6, 2016


Today you often hear the phrase, "I am spiritual but not religious." By this phrase, people usually mean they have an experience of the sacred in their lives and the world, but they don't belong to a church or follow any particular religion. Perhaps they experience "God" or the sacred while enjoying nature or creating or experiencing art or music or in an activity such running or dancing. There's no doubt that human beings are born connected to the divine and that we experience the holy in a myriad of ways. These experiences are usually good, joyful ones and may include peace and contentment.

BUFF GRACE

"Spirituality and religion: Is there a difference?", Stillwater Gazette, January 21, 2016


There's a deal in a man's inward life as you can't measure by the square, and say, 'Do this and that'll follow,' and, 'Do that and this'll follow.' There's things go on in the soul, and times when feelings come into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the scripture says, and part your life in two a'most, so as you look back on yourself as if you was somebody else. Those are things as you can't bottle up in a 'do this' and 'do that;' and I'll go so far with the strongest Methodist ever you'll find. That shows me there's deep speritial things in religion. You can't make much out wi' talking about it, but you feel it.

GEORGE ELIOT

Adam Bede


I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was ... well, a little blurry, and hard to see. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land ... and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash ... in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment ... I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV. Even though I was a believer. Perhaps because I was a believer.

BONO

remarks at National Prayer Breakfast, February 2, 2006

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Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of [another].

HARPER LEE

To Kill a Mockingbird

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Religion is a thing much talked of, but little understood; much pretended to, but very little practiced; and the reason why it is so ill practiced, is because it is not better understood. Knowledge therefore must precede religion; since it is necessary to be wise, in order to be virtuous. It must be known to whom, and upon what account duty is owing, otherwise it never can be rightly paid: It must therefore be considered, that God is the object of all Religion, and that the soul is the subject wherein it exists and resides. From the soul it must proceed, and to God it must be directed.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine

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Religion is the whole soul marching heavenward to the music of joy and love, with well-ranked faculties, every one of them beating time and keeping tune.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

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I firmly believe that the method which sets theological theories against scientifically ascertained facts, is fatal to the current theology and injurious to the spirit of religion; and that the method which frankly recognizes the facts of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scientists whose patient and assiduous endeavor has brought those facts to light, will commend the spirit of religion to the new generation, and will benefit--not impair--theology as a science, by compelling its reconstruction.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott

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To ordinary human beings, finally--the vast majority who exist for service and the general advantage, and who may exist only for that--religion gives in inestimable contentment with their situation and type, manifold peace of heart, an ennobling of obedience, one further happiness and sorrow with their peers and something transfiguring and beautifying, something of a justification for the whole everyday character, the whole lowliness, the whole half-brutish poverty of their souls. Religion and religious significance spread the splendor of the sun over such ever-toiling human beings and make their own sight tolerable to them.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Beyond Good and Evil

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Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

response to Alfred Kerr at a dinner party, The Diary of a Cosmopolitan


Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.

SAUL ALINSKY

Reveille for Radicals

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Religion & Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

JAMES MADISON

letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822

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If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose.

SRI AUROBINDO

The Uttarpara Address, May 30, 1909

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No religion is better than an unnatural one.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude

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He had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the native trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic venues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Silver Key"

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I don't think of religion as nasty. Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish. But they could go to church and have that exuberance together, and that was good, the community of it. When they were in pain, when they had to go to work even though they were in terrible pain, they had God to fall back on, and I think that's what religion does for the majority of the people. I don't think most people intellectualize about religion. They use it to keep themselves alive. I'm not talking about most Americans. We don't need it that way, most of us, now. But there was certainly a time when many of us did, maybe most of us.

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

Locus Magazine, June 2000

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Religion, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing.

ECKHART TOLLE

A New Earth

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