Quotations: God/Religion
Quotations on this page deal with the topics of God and Religion.
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"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
-Buddha
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"Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. 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 faith."
-Thomas Jefferson
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"'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued. 'There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'"
-Joseph Heller, Catch22
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"The Vision of Christ that thou dost see,
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,
Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates."
-William Blake
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"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science --or any honest intellectual inquiry."
-Stephen J. Gould
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"If God created flawed beings, how then can He go on to blame them for their flaws?"
-James Halloran
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"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."
-Robert Frost
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"There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Two men please God--who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not."
-Nikita Ivanovich Panin
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"If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment."
-Voltaire
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"An honest god is the noblest work of man."
-Robert G. Ingersoll
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"Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million."
-Mark Twain
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"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
-Voltaire
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"Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction."
-Blaise Pascal
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"Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there."
-Mohammed Neguib
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"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."
-Arthur Shopenhauer
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"What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven."
-William Shakespeare
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"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer."
-Saddi
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"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
-Thomas Paine
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"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."
-Thomas Jefferson
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"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
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"Faith: not wanting to know what is true."
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."
-Reinhold Niebuhr
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"Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God."
-Jean Rostand
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"If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can."
-Norman Mailer
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"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
-John Morley
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"Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven."
-Mark Twain
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"It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are."
-Ovid
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"God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown."
-Friedrich Neitzsche
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"Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable."
-H. L. Mencken
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"You must believe in God, in spite of what the clergy say."
-Benjamin Jowett
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"I fear God, and next to God I chiefly fear him who fears Him not."
-Saadi
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"They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse."
-Emily Dickinson
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"How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"
-Woody Allen
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"God is not a cosmic bell-boy for whom we can press a button to get things."
-Harry Emerson Fosdick
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"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."
-Peter De Vries
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"A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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"I have made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord,make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."
-Voltaire
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"We can know what God is not, but we cannot know what He is."
-Saint Augustine
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"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."
-Edmund Burke
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"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
-Albert Einstein
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"Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
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"It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity."
-Mahatma Gandhi
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"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
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"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action."
-Bertrand Russell
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"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise."
-Victor Hugo
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"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."
-Thomas Paine
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"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
-Charles Bukowski
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"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."
-Thomas Jefferson
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"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."
-Peter De Vries
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"religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."
-Stendhal
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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
-Albert Einstein
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"Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven."
-Milton
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"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of."
-Clarence Darrow
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"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
-Wilson Mizner
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"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
-Albert Einstein
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"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?"
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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"I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability."
-Oscar Wilde
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"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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"So, let's impeach god! I would like to announce my candidacy for the position of god; among other things, I promise to offer true and unquestionable proof of my existence, as the previous holder of the office of 'god' obviously failed to do."
-Rashind
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"Religion...is the opium of the masses."
-Karl Marx
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"Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money."
-Leon Lederman
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"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."
-Arthur C. Clarke
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"You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God."
-Ernest Dimnet
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"God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach."
-Heywood Broun
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"God will forgive me; it is his trade."
-Heinrich Heine
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"To accept Naturalism is to reject such entities as Cartesian minds, private visual and tactual spaces, angelic beings and God."
-D. M. Armstrong
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"MacArthur is the type of man who thinks that when he gets to heaven, God will step down from the great white throne and bow him into His vacated seat."
-Douglas MacArthur
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"The clergy believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyrrany known to the mind of man."
-Thomas Jefferson
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"Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based."
-Ambrose Bierce
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"The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the...passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life."
-Bertrand Russell
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"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."
-Ambrose Bierce
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"I'm still an atheist, thank God."
-Luis Bunuel
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"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."
-Woody Allen
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"The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven."
-Mark Twain
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