Religion Quotes

It never occurred to me to wonder why I, a religion reporter, got the biggest story of the day, though, clearly, whatever else it was, it was a religion story. It wasn't until about twenty years later that a friend who had been managing editor at a Gannett paper said to me: Rob, don't your realize you were probably the ONLY religion reporter in the whole country who got that story? I still don't know why I got it. Maybe they figure I was the only one in the newsroom who had any idea what a Sikh was. Or knew how to find them, let alone Hindus, in Orange Country, California

~ Paul Marshall

Do not lose the person God created you to be Trying to be the person The world wants you to be You are not created to fit it in You are here on earth, For a greater purpose.

~ B.a.

Seems to me that for you, evangelicalism is like the boyfriend you broke up with two years ago, but whose Facebook page you still check compulsively.

~ Rachel Held Evans

Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.

~ Cristina García

Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. Acts 3:19

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront.

~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

Without radical humility that is expressed in gestures of adoration and in sacred rituals, no friendship with God is possible. Silence manifests this connection in an obvious way. True Christian silence makes itself sacred silence first so as to become silence of communion.

~ Robert Sarah

Authentic religion is not a theology test. It's a love test.

~ Oliver Thomas

Today, some priests treat the Eucharist with the utmost contempt. They see the Mass as a talkative banquet where Christians faithful to the teaching of Jesus, divorced-and-remarried persons, men and women in an adulterous situation, unbaptized tourists who participate in the Eucharistic celebrations of the large anonymous crowds can indiscriminately have access to the Body and Blood of Christ.

~ Robert Sarah

Some priests unfaithful to the memory of Jesus insist more on the festive aspect and the fraternal dimension of the Mass than on the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The importance of interior dispositions and the necessity of reconciling ourselves with God by agreeing to let ourselves be purified by the sacrament of confession are no longer in fashion today.

~ Robert Sarah

Why are men so noisy during the liturgies while Christ's prayer was silent? The words of the Son of God come from the heart, and the heart is silent. Why do we not know how to speak with a silent heart? The heart of Jesus does not speak. It radiates with love because its language comes from the divine depths.

~ Robert Sarah

The blessing has been so significatn that we have continued our satiric tact [sic] with an additional objective in mind -- keeping the suits and haircuts away. Whenever a promising movement of the Holy Spirit begins nowadays, one of the first things that happens is that the agents, businessmen, and other assorted handlers move in so that they might straighten out certain unmarketable blemishes in order to take the show on the road. And when a promising ministry hits the big time, the unfortunate people in it are made twice as much sons of hell as their promoters. It is therefore our resolve to stay as unmarketable as we can. If we ever get invited to the Great Black Tie Banquet of Evangelicalism, we want everyone there to be braced for the moment when we, on a prearranged signal, throw our dinner rolls at Pat Robertson

~ Douglas Wilson

What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.

~ Elaine Pagels

Christ is certainly distressed to see and to hear priests and bishops, who ought to be protecting the integrity of the teaching of the Gospel and of doctrine, multiply words and writings that weaken the rigor of the Gospel by their deliberately ambiguous, confused statements.

~ Robert Sarah

Many fervent Christians who are moved by the Passion and death of Christ on the Cross no longer have the strength to weep or to utter a cry of pain to the priests and bishops who make their appearance as entertainers and set themselves up as the main protagonists of the Eucharist. These believers tell us nevertheless: We do not want to gather with men around a man! We want to see Jesus! Show him to us in the silence and humility of your prayer!

~ Robert Sarah

There is a great risk that Christians may become idolaters if they lose the meaning of silence. Our words inebriate us; they confine us to what is created. Bewitched and imprisoned by the noise of human speech, we run the risk of designing worship to our specifications, a god in our own image. Words bring with them the temptation of the golden calf! Only silence leads man beyond words, to the mystery, to worship in spirit and in truth. Silence is a form of mystagogy; it brings us into the mystery without spoiling it.

~ Robert Sarah

Now, celebrations become tiring because they unfold in noisy chattering. The liturgy is sick. The most striking symptom of this sickness is perhaps the omnipresence of the microphone. It has become so indispensable that one wonders how priests were able to celebrate before it was invented.

~ Robert Sarah

The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.

~ Sigmund Freud

.It is asking a great deal of a man, who has learnt to regulate his everyday affairs in accordance with the rules of experience and with due regard to reality, that he should entrust precisely what affects him most nearly to the care of an authority which claims as its prerogative freedom from all the rules of rational thought.

~ Sigmund Freud

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. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feelings for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses ... for in him also Christ 'vere latitat' - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

~ C.s. Lewis

The story was told, generation by generation, in song and in story, until time misted it into myth and legend. But some believed, as legends brought comfort.

~ Nora Roberts

How sick in your mind and your soul to be scared of my voice and my words.

~ The Cure

Saint-worship is not the same as hero-worship; it is a much less dangerous thing than hero-worship. For hero-worship generally means the absorption or transmutation of some part, at any rate, of one's own original ideas of goodness under the heat and hypnotism of some strong personality. But saint-worship, especially when it is a worship of saints whom we know little or nothing about, is simply the worship of that tradition of goodness in which the saint's name has been embalmed; and into that empty mould our own natural idealism can much more easily be poured.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I will complain, yet praise;I will bewail, approve:And all my sowre-sweet dayesI will lament, and love.

~ George Herbert

Is there any holy beings like human beings?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Ultimately, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is part and parcel of the human condition, and, unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before it resurfaces, often with a vengeance. On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional and religious structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.

~ Neel Burton

Religion lives not in dogma, but utterly within the virtues of love and self-sacrifice. Without those, there is no future I can bear to stand, nor hope for the continuance of God's creation. It is not blasphemy to say that the work of Jesus the redeemer was and is to break the chains of the realms of darkness. And set free the creature from the power of sin.

~ Warren Ellis

As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent.

~ C.s. Lewis

Some people live by the rules of karma. They are the best, the strongest. Some people live with the need for religion. They are the judgmental ones, the haters. They justify their hate, their violence, in the name of their chosen religion and God. Others live without the rules of karma, and without religion, just as animals do.

~ Robert Black

Clouds are just nature's stepping stones to the heavens.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

The 330 million gods and goddesses of the Hindu culture act as placebo for the masses, just like other gods of other cultures do.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.

~ Richard Feynman

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth.Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.

~ Gloria Steinem

The oft-cited charge that belief in God and religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is as untrue as it is widely believed. Secular movements in the twentieth century alone killed and enslaved more people than any other movement in any century in history.

~ Dennis Prager

Religion is the record of spiritual events. Through the repetition of past occurrences religion can give us a close approximation of the event itself, but it is not the same thing as a spiritual experience.

~ Ashavan

While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.

~ George Washington

Yet the great “Why?” always at the center of the little “whats” and “hows” that makes religions into mythologies is often stronger in dead temples than in living.

~ Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Seldom do we embrace a new idea, especially one of a religious nature.

~ Eli Of Kittim

How can a warrior fight without his weapon?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For what is truth? In matters of relogion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.

~ Oscar Wilde