quotations about religion
Ever since he repented of religion and shaved off his clerical beard and mustache, he has had the constant feeling that he has taken off his trousers, and that his nose protrudes altogether indecently and must at all cost be covered.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
"X", The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
Religion is not the tame and sleepy thing which some suppose. This misapprehension is derived partly from erroneous views of doctrine, but yet more from the examples of actual Christianity among us, which fall so far short of the biblical standard.
JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER
Faith
The more false anyone is in his religion, the more fierce and furious in maintaining it; the more mistaken, the more imposing; the more any man's religion is his own, the more he is concerned for it, but cool and indifferent enough for that which is God's.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
I worship God. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whoever he may be, I don't really care, who has put us here on earth to perform our duties as citizens and family men; but I don't need to go into a church and kiss a silver platter and reach into my pocket to fatten a pack of humbugs who eat better than we do! Because one can honor him just as well in a forest, in a field, or even gazing up at the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My own God is the God of Socrates, Franklin, Voltaire, and Béranger.... I cannot, therefore, accept the sort of jolly old God who strolls about his flower beds with cane in hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies uttering a groan and comes back to life after three days: things absurd in themselves and completely opposed, what is more, to all physical laws; which simply goes to show, by the way, that the priests have always wallowed in a shameful ignorance in which they endeavor to engulf the peoples of the world along with them.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
attributed, Wittgenstein Reads Freud
Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 16, 1915
To me there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.
WOODY ALLEN
"Woody Allen on Faith, Fortune Tellers and New York", New York Times, September 14, 2010
Many men carry their religion as a church carries its bell--high up in a belfry, to ring out on sacred days, to strike for funerals, or to chime for weddings. All the rest of the time it hangs high above reach--voiceless, silent, dead.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The word "religion" beautifully defines itself, of course. It translates "to bind" from the Latin--"re" means back and "ligare" means to tie up. All religions are straightjackets, jackets for the straight.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
speech, July 6, 1922
Men have an itch rather to make Religion than to use it: but we are to use our Religion, not to make it.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Religion is a process of turning your skull into a tabernacle, not of going up to Jerusalem once a year.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
American Atheist Magazine, winter 1998-1999
Religion makes us live as those who represent God in the world.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
There is, I believe, a danger inherent in assessing the religiosity of others. Such deliberations often rely on the use of externalities and shorthand signifiers, while real metrics of religiosity--if this is indeed something that can be "measured"--are always more complicated and more contradictory than anything that can be checked off a list.
TOVA MIRVIS
"Hard to Match", Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life, August 5, 2009
If we bring up religion we'll have differences; we'll have arguments; and we'll never be able to get together.
MALCOLM X
speech at the Congress for Racial Equality in Detroit, Michigan, April 12, 1964
Not believing in anything is also a religion.
CESARE PAVESE
The House on the Hill
I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions--and should be vigorously opposed.
STEVE ALLEN
Reflections