Quotes and text excerpts about "religion"

“ Religion is a quality that makes a man independent; disappointment will not render such an one sour, nor oppression drive him mad, nor elevation bewilder; power will not dazzle, nor gold corrupt; no threat can silence and no fear subdue. ”

“ Religion is the daughter of heaven, parent of our virtues, and source of all true felicity; she alone give peace and contentment, divests the heart of anxious cares, bursts on the mind a flood of joy, and sheds unmingled and perpetual sunshine in the pious breast. ”

“ Religion is human nature reflected, mirrored in itself. That which exists has necessarily a pleasure, a joy in itself, loves itself, and loves itself justly; to blame it because it loves itself is to reproach it because it exists. ”

“ Religion is an imaginative echo of things natural and moral: and if this echo is to be well attuned, our ear must first be attentive to the natural sounds of which, in religion, we are to develop the harmony. ”

“ Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, 268and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.
The immediate reaction of human nature to the religious vision is worship. ”

“ Religion in its true sense is the most joyous thing the human soul can know, and when the real religion is realized, we will find that it will be an agent of peace, of joy, and of happiness, and never an agent of gloomy, long-faced sadness. ”

“ Religion is not a didactic thing, that words can impart or even silence withhold: it is spiritual and contagious glory, a spontaneous union with the holy spirit evinced in our daily lives and example. ”

“ Religion is the body of beliefs and practices pertaining to the nature and worship of the Deity, and determining man's effort to propitiate him and secure his aid; ethics is the body of beliefs and practices regulating the conduct of man to man. ”

“ Religion is the first systematic attempt of man to put himself into relation with, and to find an interpretation of, the spiritual, physical and social forces of the universe, which appeared to man to be at once powerful and incomprehensible. Religion, being the result of the mental activity of primitive man, the emotional factors predominated in the formulation of its tenets. Religion may, indeed, be defined as a theory of the universe conceived by emotion and as a practice of life born of a very limited power of man over the material world. ”

“ Religion is the mainspring of all virtue, the solid foundation of all morality; and he who should attempt to found, extend, and perpetuate the kingdom of virtue apart from the kingdom of religion, would be like a man who should build a house upon the sand. Without religion, man is the sport of his passions. ”

“ A religion is a growth, and is of necessity adapted in some degree to the people among whom it grows. It is shaped and molded by the general ignorance, the superstition and credulity of the age in which it lives. ”

“ A religion is a group of ideas having the effect of motives; it is dynamic and directs human conduct. Theology, on the other hand, is more theoretical and descriptive, and its conceptions, together with those of other departments of human thought, give the materials for the formulation of the religious beliefs which determine the attitudes of men toward all of the great universe in which they play their part and whose mysteries they attempt to solve. ”

“ Religion is still, as it has [464] ever been, the very life of the people,—the motive and the directing power of their every action: a religion of doing and suffering, a religion without cant and hypocrisy. ”

“ Religion is the summa philosophia which interprets, harmonizes, systematizes, and directs to the right ordering of Society, and of the individual, all [511] knowledge from whatever source derived, all true and honest thought, all noble aspirations, all good affections. ”

“ Religion is the tie that connects man with his Creator, and holds him to His throne.
—Daniel Webster. Religion is faith in an infinite Creator, who delights in and enjoins that rectitude which conscience commands us to seek. ”

“ Religion is one, and the foremost of these things. Obedience, conformity of the finite and the imperfect will of man to the infinite and perfect will of God, this, which is the essence of religion, is an end in itself, the highest end which we can conceive. It cannot be sought as a means to an ulterior end without being at once destroyed. This is an end, or rather the end in itself, which culture and all other ends by right subserve. ”

“ Religion becomes the cause of love in human hearts, for religion is a divine foundation, the foundation ever conducive to life. The teachings of God are the source of illumination to the people of the world. Religion is ever constructive, not destructive. ”

“ Religion is a bond of social coherence. It creates loyalty. But it may teach loyalty to antiquated observances or a dwarfed system of truth. Have you ever seen believers rallying around a lost cause in religion? Yet these relics were once a live issue, and full of thrilling religious vitality.
Society changes. Will religion change with it? If society passes from agriculture and rural settlements to industry and urban conditions, can the customary practices of religion remain unchanged? ”

“ Religion resembles a drop of cochineal falling into the water; it colours with rose hue the full contents of the tumbler; it tinges the whole character and conduct of a man; it permeates his thoughts and feelings and actions, changing the colour of his life for good and for ever. Religion works a change--a radical change--that is the point. ”

“ A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element which thus finds a place in our definition is no less essential than the first; for by showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from that of the Church, it makes it clear that religion should be an eminently collective thing. ”

“ True religion is not what men see and admire; it is what God sees and loves; the faith which clings to Jesus in the darkest hour; the sanctity which shrinks from the approach of evil; the humility which lies low at the feet of the Redeemer, and washes them with tears; the love which welcomes every sacrifice; the cheerful consecration of all the powers of the soul; the worship which, rising above all outward forms, ascends to God in the sweetest, dearest communion—a worship often too deep for utterance, and than which the highest heaven knows nothing more sublime. ”

“ Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or æsthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. ”

“ A VERY IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE
in religion, because—and it is a very strange thing—very few people know the difference when they begin to talk about religion. They often tell boys that if they seek the Kingdom of God, everything else is going to be subtracted from them. They tell them that they are going to become gloomy, miserable, and will lose everything that makes a boy's life worth living—that they will have to stop baseball and story-books, and become little old men, and spend all their time in going to meetings and in singing hymns. ”

“ Whoever thinks of life as a something that could be without religion is in deathly ignorance of both. Life and religion are one, or neither is anything: I will not say neither is growing to be anything. Religion is no way of life, no show of life, no observance of any sort. It is neither the food nor medicine of being. It is life essential. To think otherwise is as if a man should pride himself on his honesty or his parental kindness, or hold up his head amongst men because he never killed one: were he less than honest or kind or free from blood, he would yet think something of himself. ”

“ Technique is the very last thing that has been thought of in religion. Religion is being converted before our eyes. It is becoming touched with the temper of science, with the thoroughness, the doggedness, the inconsolableness of science until it is seeing how and until it is saying how.
When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on goodness in the way that they are getting to work on other things, things will begin to happen to goodness that the vague, sweet saints of two thousand years have never dreamed of yet. ”

“ Science springs from man's yearning for truth; art, from his yearning for beauty; religion, from his yearning for love: and as truth, beauty, and love are a harmony, so are science, art, and religion; and if conflicts arise, they are the results of ignorance and passion. The charm of faith, hope, and love, of knowledge, beauty, and religion, lies in their power to open life's prison, thus permitting the soul to escape to commune with the Infinite and Eternal, with the boundless mysterious world of being which forever draws us on and forever eludes our grasp. ”

“ Religious must ever feel that they can bless, love, and thank religion as a good mother. But religion is not an abstract matter; it is made up of individuals reciprocally bound together in and for each other. ”

“ It has been intimated from time to time in this world that all men are sinners. Inasmuch as things are arranged so that men can sin in doing right things, and sin in doing wrong ones both, they can hardly miss it. The real religion of every age seems to have looked a little askance at perfection, even at purity, has gone its way in a kind of fine straightforwardness, has spent itself in an inspired blundering, in progressive noble culminating moral experiment.
The basis for a great character seems to be the capacity for intense experience with the character one already has. ”

“ Man has no choice; he must be the slave of the most unscrupulous and insolent amongst slaves, or else the servant of God, because for man there is only one way of being free—by uniting his will with the will of God. People bereft of religion, some repudiating religion itself, others recognizing as religion those external, monstrous forms which have superseded it, and guided only by their personal lusts, fear, human laws, and, above all, by mutual hypnotism, cannot cease to be animals or slaves, and no external efforts can extricate them from this state; for only religion makes a man free. ”

“ Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery; and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped, is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
Religion, therefore, being the belief of a God, and the practice of moral truth, cannot have connection with mystery. The belief of a God, so far from having any thing of mystery in it, is of all beliefs the most easy, because it arises to us, as is before observed, out of necessity. ”

“ Literature is degraded when contemplated as an art or as an amusement. It is a paradise, into which the best fruits of the soul, when arrived at their greatest maturity and beauty, are transplanted to bloom in immortal freshness and fragrance. It is the garner wherein the seeds of religion, virtue, morals, national greatness and individual happiness are preserved for the use of humanity. It is a gallery, where the likenesses of all the great and noble souls who have shed light and glory on the earth, are treasured up as the heirloom and palladium of the human race. ”

“ Greatness consists not in holding some office; greatness really consists in doing some great deed with little means, in the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life; that is true greatness. He who can give to this people better streets, better homes, better schools, better churches, more religion, more of happiness, more of God, he that can be a blessing to the community in which he lives to-night will be great anywhere, but he who cannot be a blessing where he now lives will never be great anywhere on the face of God's earth. ”

“ It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can be a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist—if he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of God and the love of one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give something to and leave alone.
This is what I call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship. ”

“ There is a tendency in some minds to underrate what is plain because all is not plain. For some minds the obscure has a fascination, apart altogether from its nature, just because it is obscure. It is a noble emulation to press forward and 'still to be closing up what we know not with what we know.' But neither in science nor in religion shall we make progress if we do not take heed of the opposing errors of thinking that all is seen, and of thinking that what we have is valueless because there are gaps in it. ”

“ Life, at its best, is a disappointing business. There is a lot of rough with the smooth, especially for women, especially for those women of the middle-classes in small suburban homes, over-intel-lectualized, with highly strung nerves, in a narrow environment, without many interests, and without much work. It is just because many of them are entirely without religion to give some great purpose to their inevitable trivialities that their moral perspective becomes hopelessly inverted, as though they were gazing through the wrong end of the telescope. ”

“ Have you ever seen a man who did not love his own actions? Even though they be bad actions, he loves them. How ignorant, therefore, the thought that God, Who created man, educated and nurtured him, surrounded him with all blessings, made the sun and all phenomenal existence for his benefit, bestowed upon him tenderness and kindness and then did not love him. This is palpable ignorance, for no matter to what religion a man belongs, even though he be an atheist or materialist, nevertheless, God nurtures him, bestows His kindness and sheds upon him His light. ”

“ Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion. ”