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Religion quotes

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“As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

“cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research.” Albert Einstein, The world as I see it

“So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Gods don’t like people not doing much work. People who aren’t busy all the time might start to think.” Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life.” Albert Einstein, The world as I see it

“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water!” Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.” Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there's this couple lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a...” Carl Sagan, Contact

“I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn't have much to argue about.” Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“They have made the happy discovery, that the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them.” Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“Religion and spirituality are very different, but people often confuse the two. Some things cannot be taught, but they can be awakened in the heart.” Muhammad Ali, The Soul of a Butterfly

“Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God...” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a...” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... or change.” Stephen King, The Stand

“A convert's enthusiasm for his new religion is greater than that of a person who is born in it.” Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of my Experiments with Truth

“It is in itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and of sentiment.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,—cannot be altogether men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury...” Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux

“The majority of people living on our planet profess to be believers. This should spur religions to dialogue among themselves for the sake of protecting nature, defending the poor, and building networks of respect and fraternity.” Pope Francis, Laudato si'

“How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it...” Albert Einstein, The world as I see it

“As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.” Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Answering to this, all religions promise a reward beyond life, in eternity, for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“We all have the same God, we just serve him differently. Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans, all have different names, but they all contain water.” Muhammad Ali, The Soul of a Butterfly

“And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is my heart: I know it is.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.” Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species

“The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no...” Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?” Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“So that, upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of...” Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under, which the darkest,...” Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

“If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other.” Muhammad Ali, The Soul of a Butterfly

“religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing-room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!” Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

“Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other.” Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

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Related topics

ignorance belief morality Christianity science God evil reason truth faith fear government miracle slavery difference understanding love education freedom heart

Related authors

Thomas Jefferson (4)
Terry Pratchett (3)
C. S. Lewis (6)
Carl Sagan (5)
Albert Einstein (4)
Ambrose Bierce (3)
Muhammad Ali (3)
William James (3)
Christopher Hitchens (3)
Blaise Pascal (2)
Frederick Douglass (2)
A. W. Tozer (2)
Charlotte Brontë (2)
Mahatma Gandhi (2)
Alexis de Tocqueville (2)
Charles Bukowski (2)
Herman Melville (2)
Isaac Asimov (2)
Karl Marx (2)
Virginia Woolf (2)

Related sources

The Varieties of Religious Experience (3)
Mere Christianity (4)
The world as I see it (4)
Notes on the State of Virginia (4)
The Devil's Dictionary (3)
The Soul of a Butterfly (3)
Small Gods (3)
Contact (3)
Pensées (2)
The Story of my Experiments with Truth (2)
Jane Eyre (2)
Moby-Dick (2)
Critique of Pure Reason (2)
The Pursuit of God (2)
Democracy in America (2)
The Real Frank Zappa Book (2)
The Screwtape Letters (2)
Das Kapital (2)
Ham on Rye (2)
Mrs Dalloway (2)