Abraham Joshua Heschel:
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. [New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963]



Abraham Joshua Heschel:
The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.



Abraham Lincoln:
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.



Abraham Lincoln:
That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.



Abraham Lincoln:
Friends, I agree with you in Providence; but I believe in the Providence of the most men, the largest purse, and the longest cannon. 1854



Adlai E. Stevenson:
What do I believe? As an American I believe in generosity, in liberty, in the rights of man. These are social and political faiths that are part of me, as they are, I suppose, part of all of us. Such beliefs are easy to express. But part of me too is my relation to all life, my religion. And this is not so easy to talk about. Religious experience is highly intimate and, for me, ready words are not at hand.

speech, Libertyville, Illinois, May 21, 1954



Albert Einstein:
I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.



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



Albert Einstein:
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.



Albert Einstein:
What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

The World as I See It, 1934



Albert Einstein:
Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.



Aldous Huxley:
At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.



Alfred North Whitehead:
Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.



Algernon Black:
Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.


This entry continued ,

Anais Nin:
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.



Anna Garlin Spencer:
A successful woman preacher was once asked "what special obstacles have you met as a woman in the ministry?" "Not one," she answered, "except the lack of a minister's wife."



Anne Frank:
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.



Benjamin Franklin:
The moral and religious system which Jesus Christ transmitted to us is the best the world has ever seen, or can see.



Benjamin Franklin:
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.



Benjamin Whichcote:
Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.



Bertrand Russell:
In conclusion, there is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but, by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. "What will you do, Bertie, if it turns out you're wrong?" she asked. "I mean, what if -- uh -- when the time comes, you should meet Him? What will you say?" Russell was delighted with the question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, "Why, I should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'"

Al Seckel, in Preface to Bertrand Russell on God and Religion



Bill Cosby:
For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.



Blaise Pascal:
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.



Carl Jung:
Among all my patients in the second half of life , there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.



Carl Sandburg:
Sandburg's retelling of Lincoln's attendance at an evangelist rally led by Peter Cartwright in 1846, in response to accusations by Cartwright's followers that he was an "infidel" - Cartwright was his opponent in his race for Congress:


This entry continued ,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!



Clarence Darrow:
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.

Scopes trial, Dayton, Tennessee, July 13, 1925



D. H. Lawrence:
A person 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.



David Halverstam:
Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time . . . president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.



Diderot:
A deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist. (paraphrased)



Don Hirschberg:
Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.



Elbert Hubbard:
Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one.

The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923



Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in it.



Emily Dickinson:
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,
I keep it staying at Home -
With a bobolink for a Chorister,
And an Orchard, for a Dome.



Emily Dickinson:
The Bible is an antique Volume—
Written by faded men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres—
Subjects—Bethlehem—
Eden—the ancient Homestead—
Satan—the Brigadier—
Judas—the Great Defaulter—
David—the Troubador—
Sin—a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist—
Boys that "believe" are very lonesome—
Other Boys are "lost"—
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller—
All the Boys would come—
Orpheus' Sermon captivated—
It did not condemn—



F. Forrester Church:
Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.



Felix Adler:
Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.



Felix Adler:
The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.

An Ethical Philosophy of Life



Felix Adler:
Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.



Felix Adler:
Religion is a wizard, a sibyl . . .
She faces the wreck of worlds, and prophesies restoration.
She faces a sky blood-red with sunset colours that deepen into darkness, and prophesies dawn.
She faces death, and prophesies life.



Frederick Buechner:
Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.



Frederick Douglass:
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.



Friedrich Schleiermacher:
The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.



G Gaia:
The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years, That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. , When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. , Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity.

AOL Member



G.K. Chesterton:
I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.



Galileo Galilei:
I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.



Galileo Galilei:
The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.



George J. Mitchell:
Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.



Goethe:
We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.



H. L. Mencken:
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.



H. L. Mencken:
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.



HH the Dalai Lama:
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.



HH the Dalai Lama:
Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.



Harvey Cox:
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.

The Seduction of the Spirit, 1973



Helen Keller:
The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.



Howard Nemerov:
Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.



Immanuel Kant:
Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.



Isaac Bashevis Singer:
Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

New York Times, December 3, 1978



Isaiah Berlin:
Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.



James Baldwin:
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.



James Feibleman:
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.



James Martineau:
Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.



Jessamyn West:
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

The Quaker Reader, 1962



Joan B. Campbell:
[Jesus'] ministry was clearly defined, and the alternatives to the illusion and temptations of the desert were spelled out. A choice was made -- life abundant, full, and free for all. Make no mistake about it, the day that choice was made, Jesus became suspect. That day in the temple he sealed the fate already prepared for him. How was the world to understand one who rejected an offer of power and control?

Sojourners, August-September, 1991



John Dewey:
In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy



John Dewey:
The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.



John Gardner:
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.

NYT Book Review, Jan 1983



John Godfrey Saxe:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!


1887: referring to the Buddhist fable of the Blind Sages and the Elephant, found in the Udana, chapter 6, section 4



John Warwick Montgomery:
The difficulty with pragmatic arguments for a religion is that truths do not always "work", and beliefs that "work" are by no means always true.



Jonathan Swift:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.



Jonathan Swift:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.



Karl Marx:
Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.



Louisa May Alcott:
Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come.

in Little Women, chapter 36



Lucille Ball:
I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.



Mark Morrison-Reed:
The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen. Together, our vision widens and strength is renewed.



Mark Twain:
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

1908, notebook



Mark Twain:
Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion –- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.



Mark Twain:
There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.



Mark Twain:
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Autobiography, 1959



Matthew Arnold:
Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
Forever doth accompany mankind,
Hath look'd on no religion scornfully
That men did ever find.



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



Milton Yinger:
Religion can be defined as a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life.



Mohandas Gandi:
A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.



Mohandas K. Gandhi:
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.



Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.



Noam Chomsky:
Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.



Paul Ricoeur:
To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.



Paul Tillich:
Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.

Saturday Evening Post, June 14, 1958



Paul Tillich:
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life.



Pearl S. Buck:
It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.



Pearl S. Buck:
When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.



Peter F. Drucker:
There are no creeds in mathematics.



Protagoras:
As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.



Ralph Sockman:
Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.



Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.



Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails.



Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.



Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.



Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; Unbelief, in denying them.



Ralph Waldo Emerson:
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:
The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.



Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.



Rebecca West:
Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.



Richard Francis Burton:
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.



Robert A. Heinlein:
One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.



Robert G. Ingersoll:
Many people think they have religion when they are troubled with dyspepsia.



Robert Ingersoll:
Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.



Sigmund Freud:
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.



Sir Julian Huxley:
Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable , and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.

The New Divinity



Sophia Lyon Fahs:
Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.



Susan B. Anthony:
I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.



T.S. Eliot:
Any religion, is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

Selected Essays, 1927



Theodore Dreiser:
If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.

(attributed)



Thomas Erskine:
In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.



Thomas Hobbes:
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

Leviathan



Thomas Jefferson:
Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.



Thomas Jefferson:
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.



Thomas Jefferson:
I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be judged.

1816, in a letter to Mrs. H. Harrison Smith



Thomas Jefferson:
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.



Thomas Jefferson:
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.



Thomas Moore:
The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.



Thomas Paine:
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.



Thomas Paine:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of humans; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.



Thomas Wentworth Higginson:
All , religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history.



Unknown:
Some children's answers to church school questions - from the Church of England:


This entry continued ,

Voltaire:
If God did not exist it would be necessary for us to invent Him.



Voltaire:
When it's a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.



Walt Whitman:
In the faces of men and women I see God.



Willa Cather:
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. (Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927)



William James:
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902



William O. Douglas:
Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.

opinion, United States v. Ballard, 1944



William Robertson Smith:
Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.



William Robertson Smith :
But we must not forget, this ritual expressed, certain ideas which lie at the very root of true religion, the fellowship of the worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity, and the consecration of the bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical relations between man and man.



William Robertson Smith :
In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people, and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.



Yossi Klein Halevi:
But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting.