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Religion Quotes

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Ath...

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As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It ...

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Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not k...

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An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to th...

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I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other idea...

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You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you ca...

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In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fi...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is ...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people eve...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any s...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of ...

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That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of ext...

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Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ th...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black r...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by sign...

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What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We sp...

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Annie DillardTeaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving th...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment....

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxy...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancie...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coast...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the vall...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. T...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the r...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any mor...

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Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table fro...

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Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which ...

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Picture of Anthony Storr
Anthony StorrFeet of Clay: A Study of Gurus

The Church of England is the only church in the world that interferes neither with your politics nor...

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Everybody was talking about the religious man who committed suicide. While no one in the monastery a...

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Willmore: There is no sinner like a young saint.

Why worry about minor little details like clean air, clean water, safe ports and the safety net when...

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A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive...

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The gods too are fond of a joke.

But here God didn't come. We were all on our own.

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Art SpiegelmanMaus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundatio...

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One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by relig...

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Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonst...

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Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared t...

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What a lovely thing a rose is!"He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping ...

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Thou shalt have one God only; whoWould be at the expense of two?No graven images may beWorshipped, e...

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As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised a...

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When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile are...

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[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided em...

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Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall...

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I now turn to a *subjective* consideration that belongs here; yet I can give even less distinctness ...

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Let us see rather that like Janus—or better, like Yama, the Brahmin god of death—religion has two fa...

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Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity...

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It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very accepta...

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Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, anni...

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Picture of Arthur Symons
Arthur SymonsThe Symbolist Movement in Literature

Sister Carmelita says animals don't have souls""Of course animals have souls, where did she get that...

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I'm here to tell you, there ain't much forgiveness in that old-time religion. That particular savior...

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But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire kn...

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The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his h...

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Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of m...

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Ayaan Hirsi AliHeretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

...Bin Laden's quotes from the Quaran resonated in my brain: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike ...

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Infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to ...

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This was an infidel country, whose way of life we Muslims were supposed to oppose and reject. Why wa...

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In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy...

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Ayaan Hirsi AliThe Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physica...

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Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from...

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The earth is but one country and Mankind its citizens.

Picture of Bahá'u'lláh
Bahá'u'lláhGleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns in to universal, rather th...

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the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the an...

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Barack ObamaDreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If ...

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Barack ObamaThe Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and ...

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Barbara EhrenreichNickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and th...

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So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and th...

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

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Barbara KingsolverThe Poisonwood Bible

I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail ...

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Barbara KingsolverThe Poisonwood Bible

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentenc...

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Barbara KingsolverThe Poisonwood Bible

Religion unites man with God, or forms a communication between them; yet do they not say, 'God is in...

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There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

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Bart D. EhrmanGod's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer

One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who l...

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[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bibl...

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And why have you burnt our Gods, when others are brought from other Regions by the Spaniards? Are th...

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Bartolomé de las CasasA Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

It will be said that, although God’s law is inscribed in our hearts, Scripture is nevertheless the W...

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Baruch SpinozaTheological-Political Treatise

Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matt...

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Every person should embrace those [dogmas] that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do m...

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Baruch SpinozaTheological-Political Treatise

Usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, or any faith, shape and interpret religious tho...

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Usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, or any faith, shape and interpret religious tho...

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Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentlemen were brutal savages in an ...

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How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!

If men are so wicked with religion what would they be without it?

Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much no...

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But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to cla...

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We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our i...

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And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be ...

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It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of...

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Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt ...

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I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious--for instance, the nun...

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Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cann...

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When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can...

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It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been bel...

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Picture of Bertrand Russell
Bertrand RussellAn Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity

In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of...

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I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief wil...

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A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryin...

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Picture of Bertrand Russell
Bertrand RussellWhy I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects