Religion Quotes

For example, your man might think: I don’t steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they’ve been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we’re headed right back toward The Virtues.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.

~ John Paul Ii

When I was a child I burnt the back of my right hand on a hot iron. I can't recall the pain, but there's an eye-shaped scar as testament to it. As a teenager I used to think it was the all seeing eye of the anti-Christ and that I was the devil incarnate. Or at least a minion. It was my right hand, innit?What I do remember though is my father, or Dad as we called him, abandoning the polite Abbu, telling me not to cry and to be patient because the fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fire of the iron.

~ Ruth Ahmed

You can’t burn down a made-up place.

~ John Green

and beware those whoonly takeinstructions from theirGodfor they havefailed completely to live their ownlives.

~ Charles Bukowski

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

~ Eric Hoffer

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal.

~ Marilynne Robinson

The domesticated cat in many homes is a friend, a companion, a family member. It is seen as a symbol of grace and poise both in ancient Egypt and in modern society. Women are oft described as cats as men are described as dogs in metaphor as well. Religious adoration of cats was also in ancient Egypt.1 So in some aspects they have, at least, a religious context. This, though, is not what one should look at primarily for a clear indication of their connection to religion. They are examples of a spectrum of how natural spirituality had developed over time.

~ Leviak B. Kelly

For transformation to be successful, we the people must first liberate ourselves and our brethren from the clutches of religion.

~ Sunday Adelaja

At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Religion demands above all the concentration of the spirit...it is a thrusting into the unity of all things so as to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with the unity of the One from Whom it all comes.

~ Abraham Kuyper

One of the biggest issues I have against organised religion is its unregulated ability to separate people. I have never seen such a strongly rooted divisive tool in my entire time on earth as religion. With politics, sometimes better reasoning prevails and the boundaries are blurred, this is not the case with religion.Men go to war, murder, blackmail, condemn others wholly because of different religious beliefs. Something so abstract yet so strong. It is amazing.

~ Magnus Nwagu Amudi

The world has always teemed with a wide variety of spiritual thought and many differing journeys of the heart. But too often the world has used these differences as a weapon. How much agony has been wrought by what should be a thing of beauty - religious passion?

~ Steve Goodier

In comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

As a motivation —for humans, but Christians especially— guilt is always wrong and can never move them to do anything He wants of them. Never let them realize that.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they’re always either standing next to a hole or down in it.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you’ll ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to obey, but to feel less guilty, thus nothing about their souls will be reshaped.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don’t feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they’re stuck right where they started: Guilty.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Let go into His arms until you find yourself obsessed on things divine

~ John Crowder

It’s never easy letting go. But if we don’t learn the art of relinquishment, we’ll never move forward to embrace the new relationships God has for us.

~ Mary E. Demuth

You preach cleanliness,so I try to keep my room clean,but I feel no closer to God, and I guess that’s okaybecause he doesn’t knowwho he’s fucking with anyway.

~ Kris Kidd

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.

~ Geoffrey Wood

With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.

~ Geoffrey Wood

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we’ve already got them in Hell.

~ Geoffrey Wood

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.

~ Geoffrey Wood

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

~ Marya Hornbacher

At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don’t know, really, where we are, how we got here, how long the pain will last, or how to move past it. That uncertainty may be the most painful part of not knowing a God: no one is there to reassure us that a God will take the pain and confusion away. We simply don’t know. And we have no way to numb ourselves or to forget the condition we’re in.

~ Marya Hornbacher

My nose bleeds, and every comedown feels like an overdose. I try to make peace with God each time, but he shows no interest, and it reminds me of my dad, and I get so upset that I just have to do another line. Like I said, a cycle.

~ Kris Kidd

If we really exist merely to fulfill God’s plan: then life is a television drama; with God being the scriptwriter, the director, and, the audience.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

My definition of a true religion is one that does good in the world.It tries to find ways to help people be themselves. It does not try to shape people to be what we think they should be, then break spiritual or man-made laws to accomplish that. The sign of a good religion is that it helps the people grow to become more godlike, to be capable of more love and mercy---for themselves as well as for others.

~ Harold Klemp

All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry Help!

~ William James

Cease, daughter! said the priest at last in a trembling voice. I cannot grant absolution, no priest could...

~ Anya Seton

You want a sermon? Jesus died and resurrected and then run off to Heaven to leave us sinners here. Amen.

~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

'Are our gods better than Olaf's god?' Alfdis laughed. 'That's a silly question. Gods are gods. Our gods have been with us since the beginning of the world. We sacrifice to them, and they aid us when they see fit. Other people have their own gods and their own ways of dealing with them. That's their concern.'

~ James Erich

I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday's Departure

~ Suzanne Anderson