Famous Quotes About Religion By Reference

(73 Items) A great collection of quotes about Religion. Quotations are arranged alphabetically and can be sorted by any header. This list of Religion sayings and quotes includes the sources and authors of the Religion quotes when possible. We hope you find this list of quotations about the topic Religion useful as a reference list or informative as you surf the web, and you can find many other lists of quotes about subjects on Ranker. Use this factual list to build your own just like it that fits your opinions of where everything should be ranked.

Print Blog View Views: 1637 Items: 73

< >

Show: 25 100

Order Name Author Subjects

1

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Religion
2

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

G. K. Chesterton

Religion
3

A good test of a man's religion is its vitality.

Religion
4

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

Albert Einstein

Science, Religion, Mystery
5

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

Religion
6

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

D. H. Lawrence

Religion
7

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.

Carl Sagan

Science, Religion
8

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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Religion
9

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Religion
10

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion
11

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Thomas Paine

Religion
12

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former -- of the corruption of the will.

Alexander Herzen

Religion
13

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

George Bernard Shaw

Religion
14

And lips say God be pitiful, who never said, God be praised.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Religion
15

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?

Harriet Martineau

Religion
16

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

Northrop Frye

Religion
17

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.

Barack Obama

Democracy, Religion
18

Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it's glories.

Brigham Young

Religion
19

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.

Thomas Paine

Religion
20

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion
21

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

Thomas Hobbes

Religion
22

Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without assistance.

Elbert Hubbard

Religion
23

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day...

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron

Religion
24

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

Mark Twain

Religion
25

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence.

Christopher Marlowe

Religion
26

I do benefits for all religions -- I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.

Bob Hope

Religion
27

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Religion
28

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Douglas Adams

Religion
29

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.

Mark Twain

Religion
30

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

Edgar Quinet

Religion
31

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

Edward Hoagland

Religion
32

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Religion
33

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Blaise Pascal

Religion
34

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Albert Einstein

Religion
35

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

George Bernard Shaw

Religion
36

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it ought to be treated as a common enemy.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Religion
37

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion
38

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.

Edmund Burke

Religion
39

No, if you talk to God you're religious. If God talks to you, you're psychotic.

Doris Egan

Religion, God, Prayer, Psychosis, Hallucination
40

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

Louis Aragon

Religion
41

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.

Michel de Montaigne

Religion
42

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.

Sigmund Freud

Religion
43

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

John Updike

Religion
44

Religion I have disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give to them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had that and I had not given them one cent, they would be rich. If they have not that, and I had given them the world, they would be poor.

Patrick Henry

Religion
45

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Harriet Martineau

Religion
46

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.

G. I. Gurdjieff

Religion
47

Religion is like holding on to a rock in the middle of a raging river; faith is learning how to swim.

Religion
48

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Susan Sontag

Religion
49

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Karl Marx

Religion
50

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Karl Marx

Religion
51

Religion! what treasure untold resides in that heavenly word!

William Cowper

Religion
52

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Ambrose Bierce

Religion
53

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Marquis de Sade

Religion
54

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Oscar Wilde

Religion
55

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Bertrand Russell

Religion
56

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Ezra Pound

Religion
57

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Alan Turing

Science, Religion
58

So well do I love you, I go to my god singing your praises. When I meet my father, I will tell him I fought beside you.

Janet Morris

Metaphysics, Love, Religion, Courage, Death, Ontology, Faith, Honour, Male bonding, Sacrifice, Religion, Brotherhood, Love between men, Sacred Band Ethos, Polytheism, Platonic Love, Afterlife, Homosexuality More
59

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

C. S. Lewis

Religion
60

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.

Salman Rushdie

Religion
61

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Religion
62

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion
63

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Matthew Arnold

Religion
64

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

George Bernard Shaw

Religion
65

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

William James

Religion
66

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.

Seán O'Casey

Religion
67

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

William Ralph Inge

Religion
68

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

Eric Hoffer

Religion
69

Toleration is the best religion.

Victor Hugo

Religion
70

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.

Victor Hugo

Religion
71

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

Karl Kraus

Religion
72

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Joseph de Maistre

Religion
73

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley

Religion

Showing items 1 - 25 of 73

Famous Quotes About Religion you can use this list to help make your own ranked list about this topic

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

A good test of a man's religion is its vitality.

A maker of idols is never an idolater.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

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.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former -- of the corruption of the will.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

And lips say God be pitiful, who never said, God be praised.

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.

Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it's glories.

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.

For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without assistance.

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day...

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence.

I do benefits for all religions -- I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it ought to be treated as a common enemy.

Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.

No, if you talk to God you're religious. If God talks to you, you're psychotic.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Religion I have disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give to them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had that and I had not given them one cent, they would be rich. If they have not that, and I had given them the world, they would be poor.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.

Religion is like holding on to a rock in the middle of a raging river; faith is learning how to swim.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Religion! what treasure untold resides in that heavenly word!

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

So well do I love you, I go to my god singing your praises. When I meet my father, I will tell him I fought beside you.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

Toleration is the best religion.

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.