Religion Quotes, Quotations and Sayings
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike
It is doubtless true that religion has been the world’s psychiatrist throughout the centuries.
Karl Menninger
Born again?! No, I’m not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time.
Dennis Miller
There’s something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt.
Mignon McLaughlin
Most men’s anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady that neither of them care for.
George Savile
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 circumstances.
Theodore Dreiser
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis
Most sermons sound to me like commercials – but I can’t make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.
Mignon McLaughlin
I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Dalai Lama
All men have need of the gods.
Homer
People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw
Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.
Harvard Lamphoon
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.
Albert Einstein
Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
A religion without the element of mystery would not be a religion at all.
Edwin Lewis
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
G.C. Lichtenberg
Some people would have us love, or rather obey God, chiefly because he outbids the devil.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction. ~Author Unknown
Follow Descartes! Do not give up the religion of your youth until you get a better one.
Martin H. Fischer
When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.
Frank Sinatra
Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
Isaac Asimov
Scriptures: the sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Bierce
I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.
Peter Walker
“I refuse to prove that I exist” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.” “Oh,” says man, “but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn’t it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don’t. Q.E.D.” “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Douglas Adams
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger
No man treats a motor car as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, he does not say, “You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.” He attempts to find out what is wrong and set it right.
Bertrand Russell
My religious position: I think that God could do a lot better, and I’m willing to give Him the chance.
Mignon McLaughlin
Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.
Austin O’Malley
The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell.
Sean Ningen
Christianity is not being destroyed by the confusions and concussions of the time; it is being discovered.
Hugh E. Brown
The churches must learn humility as well as teach it. ~George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
John Morley
A faith of convenience is a hollow faith.
M*A*S*H
How orderly philosophical is the landscape, are all the inhabitants of this World! It is the creation of a god who “ever plays the geometer.”
Aldous Huxley
I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.
Doug McLeod
I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.
Joe Mullally
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
George Santayana
I believe in God; I just don’t trust anyone who works for him. ~Author unknown, from a stand-up comedy routine on television.
Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
Blaise Pascal
Traveler: “God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer.”
Farmer: “You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn’t around.”
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
G.K. Chesterton
In church, sacred music would make believers of us all – but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance.
Mignon McLaughlin
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
Paul Valery
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C. S. Lewis
Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” Priest: “No, not if you did not know.” Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?”
Annie Dillard
I considered atheism, but there weren’t enough holidays.
You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott
A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.
Havelock Ellis
Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.
Ambrose Bierce
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.
Arthur C. Clarke
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Mohandas Gandhi
Not all religion is to be found in the church, any more than all knowledge is found in the classroom.
But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
Mark Twain
It is fear that first brought gods into the world.
Petronius Arbiter
Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence; they have relegated him to a sanctuary; the walls of the temple restrict his view; he does not exist outside of it.
Diderot
If triangles had a God, He’d have three sides.
Old Yiddish Proverb
There are three religious truths: 1) Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. 2) Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith. 3) Baptists do not recognize each other in the liquor store or at Hooters.
I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
Henry Ward Beecher
Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few his precepts!
O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.
Benjamin Franklin
Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
Frederick Douglass
Were the purportings of the Bible to be a revelation false, it would still be the truest book that was ever written.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.
Albert Camus
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
Douglas Adams
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
Robert Green Ingersoll
If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said “No.”
Margaret Smith
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
Arthur Schopenhauer
All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.
Cathy Ladman
If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
Lenny Bruce
Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief.
Oscar Wilde
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Stephen Roberts
I’m not religious, but I like God and he likes me.
Tony Kushner
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
Robert G. Ingersoll
God made so many different kinds of people. Why would he allow only one way to serve him?
Martin Buber
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Douglas Adams
No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard.
William Ernest Hocking
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
Michel de Montaigne
I didn’t know I had a quarrel with him. ~Henry Thoreau in answer to the question, “Have you made your peace with God?”
A man without religion is like a horse without a bridle.
Latin Proverb
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
John Adams
There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.
Louis Kronenberger
Moral: a peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord.
Donald Morgan
Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.
Albert Einstein
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.
Denis Diderot
No creed can be stretched to the size of truth; no church can be made as large as man.
Lemuel K. Washburn
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
David Hume
In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.
Jonathon Miller
I speak not of men’s creeds – they rest between
Man and his Maker.
George Gordon, Lord Byron
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Richard Burton
Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.
The myths about Hades and the gods, though they are pure invention, help to make men virtuous.
Diodorus Siculus
They were allowed to stay there on one condition, and that is that they didn’t eat of the tree of knowledge. That has been the condition of the Christian church from then until now. They haven’t eaten as yet, as a rule they do not.
Clarence Darrow
A converted cannibal is one who, on Friday, eats only fishermen.
Emily Lotney
I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.
Heinz Pagels
I believe in God, but I’m not too clear on the other details.
Bill Veeck
People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
Dave Barry
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson
Jesus saves… passes to Moses… shoots… scores!
Thousands have gone to heaven who never read one page of the Bible.
Francis A. Baker
No rage is equal to the rage of a contented right-thinking man when he is confronted in the marketplace by an idea which belongs in the pulpit.
Thurman W. Arnold
Those people who tell me that I’m going to hell while they are going to heaven somehow make me very glad that we’re going to separate destinations.
Martin Terman
One cannot erect, on the basis of a motive that exists only for a very few, an obligation that shall apply to everyone.
Sigmund Freud
Inspiration: a peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God.
Voltaire
A theologian is a person who uses the word ‘God’ to hide his ignorance.
Lemuel K. Washburn
God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If this was the only way they could understand the difference between good and evil, how could they have known that it was wrong to disobey God and eat the fruit?
Laurie Lynn
The Bible may be the truth but it’s not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Samuel Butler
Religion seems to have a way of making people abandon logic.
Amanda Baxter
All religions must be tolerated… for… every man must get to heaven his own way.
Frederick the Great
To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals.
Don Schrader
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.
C.S. Lewis
God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power.
Robert G. Ingersoll
A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism.
Donald Morgan
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
Frederick Douglass
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
Pascal, Pensees
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
Napoleon Bonaparte
A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain – then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?
Robert A. Heinlein
[A]ll deities reside in the human breast.
William Blake
The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man’s chains. Man must throw off the flowers and also the chains.
Karl Marx
The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs.
Bill Maher
The church is the great lost and found department.
Robert Short
Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.
Butch Hancock
The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs.
Bill Maher
The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.
Sydney Smith
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Carl Sagan
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Douglas Adams
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
H. L. Mencken
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
Helen Keller
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
It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.
Helen Keller
Jim Bakker spells his name with two k’s because three would be too obvious.
Bill Maher
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul.
Kahlil Gibran
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
George Bernard Shaw
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
Bill Gates
One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.
Robert A. Heinlein
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
Soren Kierkegaard
Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.
Paul Tournier
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Edmund Burke
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Cross is a gibbet – rather an odd thing to make use of as a talisman against bad luck, if that is how we regard it. Or is it, instead, a cynical reminder that Virtue usually gets pilloried whenever it makes one of its occasional appearances in this world?
Denis Johnston
Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.
Frederick II
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
George Santayana
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
Thomas Jefferson
I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two
institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
George Carlin