RELIGION QUOTES VI
quotations about religion
A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but--live for it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Religion is the artifice, you know, the building, after God has left it sometimes, like Elvis has left the building. You hold onto religion, you know, rules, regulations, traditions. I think what God is interested in is people's hearts, and that's hard enough.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, December 1, 2002
Where Religion does take place and is effectual, it makes this world, in measure and degree, representative of Heaven.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Religion, as it has been generally taught, is anything but an elevating principle. It has been used to scare the child, and appal the adult. Men have been virtually taught to glorify God by flattery, rather than by becoming excellent and glorious themselves, and thus doing honor to their Maker. Our dependence on God has been so taught, as to extinguish the consciousness of our free nature and moral power. Religion, in one or another form, has always been an engine for crushing the human soul. But such is not the religion of Jesus Christ. If it were, it would deserve no respect.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
What is living religion? It is the human soul growing towards the Ideal, throwing out tendrils here and there, and ever ascending from bud to bloom; ever enriched by the fact of its perfectability, operating incessantly on the trammels an establishment may lace around it, straining them and bursting them, ever seeking its proper expansion, and ever therefore impatient of restraint.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
For the existence of any religion there must be a belief that there is, somewhere in the universe, an intelligence of a higher order than man's, and that this intelligence possesses a power superior to what we call the ordinary powers of nature. And religion is simply the condition or adjustment of the relations between each individual human soul and that higher intelligence, call it by what name you will.
ROSSITER JOHNSON
"The Whispering Gallery"
It is hard for many people to give up the religion in which they were born; to admit that their fathers were utterly mistaken, and that the sacred records of their country are but collections of myths and fables.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
Some Mistakes of Moses
Without religion no man can soar.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
For the man who does not want God of course will not find him; and the man who is busy searching for something else will not find God; and certainly the man who has coined the atrophy of faculty into a philosophy that the Eternal and the Invisible cannot be seen or known, cannot see or know.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
GORE VIDAL
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
The evangelists' success points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them.
BARACK OBAMA
The Audacity of Hope
I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?
WILLIAM GIBSON
No Maps for These Territories
Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. Belief in the reality of religion involves belief that God is, and that He stands in some personal relation to man. But it is not an opinion respecting God, nor an opinion respecting His influence in the world of men. It is a personal consciousness of God. It is a human experience, but an experience of relationship with One who transcends humanity. The creed is not religion; the creed is a statement of what certain men think about religion. Worship is not religion; worship is a method of expressing religion. The church is not religion; the church is an organization of men and women, formed for the purpose of promoting religion. Religion precedes creeds, worship, church; that is, the life precedes men's thoughts about the life, men's expression of the life, men's organizations formed to promote the life. Religion may be personal or social; that is, it may be the consciousness of God in the individual soul, or it may be the concurrent consciousness of God in a great number of individuals, producing a social or communal life. In either case it is a life, not an opinion about life. It is not a definition of God, it is fellowship with Him; not a definition of sin, but sorrow because of sin; not a definition of forgiveness, but relief from remorse; not a definition of redemption, but a new and divine life.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. What the mystic finds waiting for him, then, is a humanity which has been prepared to listen to his message by other mystics invisible and present in the religion which is actually taught. Indeed his mysticism itself is imbued with this religion, for such was its starting point. His theology will generally conform to that of the theologians. His intelligence and his imagination will use the teachings of the theologians to express in words what he experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually. And this he can do easily, since theology has tapped that very current whose source is the mystical. Thus his mysticism is served by religion, against the day when religion becomes enriched by his mysticism. This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.
HENRI BERGSON
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed; to persecute all other sects, and to plunder their own.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Is There a God?", The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell