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Religion |
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| "This is my simple religion. There is no
need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain,
our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." |
| -- Dalai Lama |
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| “We
are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears
apples.” |
| -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) |
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| "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 (1875-1955), German-born
American theoretical physicist |
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| "Religion is confining and imprisoning and
toxic because it is based on ideology and dogma. But spirituality is
redeeming and universal." |
| -- Deepak K. Chopra (b. 1946), Writer, author |
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| "It is a fine thing to establish one's own
religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and
second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but
a greater thing." |
| -- D. H. Lawrence, English novelist |
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| "There is only one
religion, though there are a hundred versions of it." |
| --
George Bernard Shaw
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| "In the matter of religion, people eagerly
fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and
yours; whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements
and identities in all the religions of humanity." |
| -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), American
writer |
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| "Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief." |
| -- Oscar
Wilde (1854-1900), Irish writer, playwright |
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| "Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes
more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and
enabling it to make its peace with its destiny." |
| -- George Santayana (1863-1952),
Spanish-born American philosopher |
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| "One man's religion is another man's belly laugh." |
| -- Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-88),
American writer |
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| "The fact that astronomies change while
the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and
thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a
final formulation of spiritual truth." |
| -- Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), American
religious leader |
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| "I never told my religion nor scrutinize
that of another. I never attempted to make a convert nor wished to
change another's creed. I have judged of others' religion by their
lives, for it is from our lives and not from our words that our
religion must be read. By the same test must the world judge
me." |
| -- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) |
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| "Scriptures,
n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the
false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based." |
| -- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), American
writer, The Devil's Dictionary |
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| "Religions are many and diverse, but
reason and goodness are one." |
| -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), American author |
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| "When I have a terrible need of-- shall I
say the word-- religion. Then I go out and paint the stars." |
| -- Vincent Van Gogh, French painter |
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| "It's not what you look at that matters,
it's what you see." |
| -- Henry David Thoreau |
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| "I saw the angel in the marble and carved
until I set him free." |
| -- Michelangelo, Italian painter |
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| "He who begins by loving Christianity
better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church
better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than
all." |
| -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English
poet |
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| "Fiction reveals truths that reality
obscures." |
| -- Jessamyn West |
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“Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...”
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| -- John Lennon, English rock composer and
performer |
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| "All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and
to have a story to live by...religion, whatever else it has done, has provided
one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need." |
| -- (William) Harvey Cox (b. 1939),
Northern Irish writer, author |
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| "Organized religion is a oxymoron.
Religion should be a personal spiritual quest. There are few
organized religions that foster this quest in a sincere way.
Every spiritual individual benefits from association with other
spiritual minded people. However, organized religion is organized
too often to benefit from the herd mentality through adherence to
dogma, not to guide individuals spiritually." |
| -- Albert Emerson Unaterra (1952-2002),
American writer |
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| "The artist needs no religion beyond his work." |
| -- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915),
American author, "A Message to Garcia" |
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| "It is the test of a good religion whether
you can joke about it." |
| -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936),
British writer |
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| "The Churches must learn humility as well as teach it." |
| -- George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950), Irish-born British playwright |
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| "Going to church doesn't
make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car." |
| --
Laurence J. Peter
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| “Medicine
makes people ill, mathematics makes them sad, theology makes them
sinful.” |
| -- Martin Luther
(1483-1546) |
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| "Science without religion is lame, religion
without science is blind." |
| -- Albert
Einstein
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| "Religion is the
sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world - It is the opium
of the people."
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| --
Karl Marx |
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| "I
do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with
sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." |
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--
Galileo Galilei |
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| "Religion points to that area of human
experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a
summons to pilgrimage." |
| -- (Carl) Frederick Buechner (b. 1926),
American writer |
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| "A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the
moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of
a cathedral." |
| -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer |
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| "A
long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you
into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed
by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain—then have a heart
attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the
system?" |
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-- Robert A. Heinlein |
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| "Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked
cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and
the good listen with attention while you expound your own." |
| -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary |
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| "Cruel persecution and intolerance are not
accidents, but grow out of the very essense of religion, namely, its
absolute claims." |
| -- Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947),
Russian-born American educator, philosopher |
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| "If a man would follow, today, the
teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he
would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane." |
| -- Robert G. Ingersoll |
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| "When the missionaries came to Africa they
had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us
pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we
had the Bible and they had the land." |
| -- Desmond Tutu |
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| "No man ever believes that the Bible means
what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he
means." |
| -- George Bernard Shaw |
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| "One's religion is whatever one is most
interested in." |
| -- Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937),
British writer |
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| “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to their status quo to
save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the
inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true
ekklesia, and the hope of the world.”
|
| -- Martin Luther King, Jr. |
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| “It is more important to create
a safer, kinder world than to recruit more people to the religion
that happens to satisfy us.” |
| -- Dalai Lama |
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| "The modern man abhors dogmatic postulates
taken on faith and the religions based upon them. He holds them
valid only insofar as their knowledge-content seems to accord with
his own experience of the deeps of psychic life." |
| -- Carl Jung |
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| "The perfect church service would be the
one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.
But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the
service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than
worshipping." |
| -- Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), British
writer |
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| "Religion is an attempt to get control
over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the
wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of
biological and psychological necessities." |
| -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian
psychoanalyst |
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| "To know that what is impenetrable to us
really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most
radiant beauty, which our dull facilities can comprehend only in the
most primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center
of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I
belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious men." |
| -- Albert Einstein (1875-1955), German-born
American theoretical physicist |
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