Religious Quotations

Quotations of a divine inspiration? Or possibly simply concerning some aspect of religion.

Showing 37 through 72 of 162 quotations in this category.

"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."

-Arthur Shopenhauer

"Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there."

-Mohammed Neguib

"Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God."

-Jean Rostand

"I just converted out of Christianity because I saw how ironic it was that god created us as flawed creatures and expects us to thank him for saving us from our flaws."

-CrimeAgainst (on the web)

"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."

-Galileo Galilei

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

-H. L. Mencken

"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

-Reinhold Niebuhr

"Two men please God--who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not."

-Nikita Ivanovich Panin

"Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction."

-Blaise Pascal

"Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My maker was divine authority,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things were made,
And I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, ye who enter here."

-The Gates of Hell (From Dante's Inferno)

"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."

-Albert Einstein

"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls."

-Albert Einstein

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

-Voltaire

"Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful."

-Seneca

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven."

-William Shakespeare

"All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all."

-H. L. Mencken

"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise."

-Victor Hugo

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."

-Thomas Paine

"A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows."

-Mark Twain

"I fear God, and next to God I chiefly fear him who fears Him not."

-Saadi

"They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse."

-Emily Dickinson

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

-Thomas Jefferson

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

-Albert Einstein

"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?"

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"You must believe in God, in spite of what the clergy say."

-Benjamin Jowett

"Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven."

-Milton

"How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"

-Woody Allen

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

-Charles Bukowski

"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of."

-Clarence Darrow

"God is not a cosmic bell-boy for whom we can press a button to get things."

-Harry Emerson Fosdick

"A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol."

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"I have made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord,make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

-Voltaire

"Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind."

-George Orwell

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."

-Edmund Burke

"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche