Religion Quotes

I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate.

~ George Carlin

There is no God and we are his prophets.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

~ Richard Dawkins

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

~ Kahlil Gibran

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.

~ Confucius

What have I always believed?That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

~ Terry Pratchett

Only priests and fools are fearless and I've never been on the best of terms with God.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

~ Carl Sagan

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.

~ Albert Einstein

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.

~ Terry Pratchett

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

~ Albert Einstein

Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

~ Terry Pratchett

I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

~ George Carlin

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true.

~ Neil Gaiman

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

~ C.s. Lewis

What has he found who has lost God?And what has he lost who has found God?

~ Ibn 'Ata'illah Al-Iskandari

I suppose that 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 modesty is too arrogant for me.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.

~ Yann Martel

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

~ C.s. Lewis

I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

~ Émile Zola

Just because I do not accept the teachings of the devotaries does not mean I've discarded a belief in right and wrong. determines what is right! right? I believe that my own morality -- which answers only to my heart -- is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.

~ Brandon Sanderson

All religions are true but none are literal.

~ Joseph Campbell

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means.

~ Brennan Manning

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

~ John Paul Ii

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

~ Joseph Campbell

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil. (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

~ Richard Dawkins

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

~ Frank Zappa

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally.

~ Bill Maher

Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse.

~ Jasper Fforde

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

~ Edmond De Goncourt

Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

~ Denis Diderot