Religion Quotes

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
– John Updike
When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
– Vincent van Gogh
Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.
– Voltaire
When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
– Voltaire
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
– George Washington
Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils.
– Arthur Wellesley
The Lord's prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals.
– Arthur Wellesley
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
– Theodore H. White
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
– Edward O. Wilson
True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
– Edward O. Wilson
Energy, energy? Energy is, is, it's nothing more than a lot of new age hokum masquerading as religion.
– Tony Wilson
Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.
– Thomas Wolfe
Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken.
– Lemuel K. Washburn
In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed.
– Noah Webster
It is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.
– Noah Webster
No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.
– Noah Webster
Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.
– Benjamin Whichcote
The search for religion is the starting point of thought.
– Xu Zhimo
Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
– Blaise Pascal
Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.
– Israel Zangwill
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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
– Thomas Paine
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
– Carl Sandburg
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
– George Bernard Shaw
Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.
– Karen Armstrong
You're always going to have extremists in every religion.
– King Abdullah II
You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
– John Ruskin
You know, religion itself, Eastern and Western, is divisive and quarrelsome anyway.
– Deepak Chopra
You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I like the way that religion is done there.
– Natalie Portman
You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.
– Joni Mitchell
You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.
– Geraldine Brooks
Yoga is not a religion to me.
– Christy Turlington
Worship means reverence and humility it means revering your real self and humbling delusions.
– Bodhidharma
Wonder is the basis of worship.
– Thomas Carlyle
With religion I was always like, 'Does it matter if it's true if it makes you happy?'
– Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?
– Tony Campolo
Who made these laws? That's what I want to know. So that's why I wear two crosses now. I call it double cross. I believe in God-not religion.
– Ja Rule
Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that's important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.
– The Dalai Lama
Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.
– Elie Wiesel
When you're in prison, you either embrace religion or you reject it. I embraced it it was a very spiritual time for me.
– Henrique Capriles Radonski
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
– Anais Nin
When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.
– Walter Jon Williams
When push comes to shove, it ain't the science that's going to lift you up-it's the belief, the spiritual side of life, that's going to lift you up, no matter what religion you are.
– Kirstie Alley
When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink, and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied.
– John Woolman
When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
– Irvine Welsh
When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe.
– Kathie Lee Gifford
What use is revelation or religion if it doesnt change anything?
– Abu Bakar Bashir
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
– Doris Lessing
What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music - participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing.
– Will Oldham
What is especially important is addressing the question of how religion can be enforced through political means and what can be done to create a political environment that, on the one hand, acknowledges the role of religion in society, while on the other hand does not impose one religion on the populace at the expense of all others.
– Tony Campolo
What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.
– Ernest Gaines
What are my sources of strength? My husband and my three kids, my health-care team, and my religion.
– Geraldine Ferraro
What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!
– Sydney Smith
Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion.
– Bernice Johnson Reagon
Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it.
– Natalie Portman
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
– George Santayana
We're all sick of holy wars and bloodshed because religion is supposed to give us life and a better life and is supposed to bring out our best self. When it results in mass destruction and hatred and anxiety, it's the antithesis I think of what religion was designed to do.
– Vera Farmiga
We need a new religion.
– Lauren Hutton
We must seek the loving-kindness of God in all the breadth and open-air of common life.
– George A. Smith
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
We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.
– Herbert Read
We live in a great country. It's time again to get religion about it.
– Eric Liu
We have no problems with Jews and highly respect Judaism as a holy religion.
– Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
– Jonathan Swift
We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.
– Jonathan Sacks
We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave society devoid of belief.
– Jeff Miller
We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit.
– William Robertson Smith
We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.
– Tom Baker
Wars have always started over religion.
– Glenn Danzig
Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. It's not something that any culture, religion or tradition propagates.
– Michelle Bachelet
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Twenty five percent of Israeli citizens are not even Jewish. Anybody can become an Israeli citizen if you qualify. Religion is not a criterion for citizenship.
– Alan Dershowitz
True Americanism is opposed utterly to any political divisions resting on race and religion.
– Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.
– Jerry Saltz
Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.
– Naguib Mahfouz
To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts to the second, the Epistles to the third, the Revelation.
– Philip Schaff
To reject even one major tenet of the religion or to violate one major rule of behavior is enough to get one kicked out - or worse.
– Robert Shea
To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was.
– Reese Witherspoon
To have dominion by religion, is to have dominion over men's souls, thus over their very spiritual life, and to use the Divine things, which are in their religion, as the means.
– Emanuel Swedenborg
Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society.
– William Robertson Smith
Those among them that have not received our religion do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it, so that all the while I was there one man was only punished on this occasion.
– Sir Thomas More
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.
– The Dalai Lama
Think about all the great leaders. Think about Obama. Think about Clinton. Think about Nelson Mandela. Think about all the people that we know who are very successful in business, in politics and religion. What are they? They tell purposeful stories. They move people to action by aiming at the heart.
– Peter Guber
They have hijacked my religion.
– Cat Stevens
They become the keepers of the mystery. They place themselves between the communicants of the religion, and the immediate experience. And then they dictate the terms on which you can have contact with this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms.
– Larry Harvey
There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.
– Tim Heidecker
There was no religion in my life growing up. Did God invent us or did we invent God?
– Eddie Izzard
There was no division I could see between the essential teaching of all Prophets and wise men of religion.
– Cat Stevens
There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be.
– ASAP Rocky
There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God.
– Elizabeth I
There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.
– Niccolo Machiavelli
There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.
– Anna Sewell
There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.
– Jeane Kirkpatrick
There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.
– Polly Toynbee
There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.
– Sir Walter Scott
There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.
– Havelock Ellis
There is a holy, mistaken zeal in politics, as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.
– Junius