c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.
— Isabel Allende, Mi país inventado: Un paseo nostálgico por Chile
A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development---to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.The Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Ist eine Lehre zur Satzung erstarrt, hat sie geendet.
— Lao Tzu
You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.
— Leo Tolstoy, Eleven Stories
The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.
— C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
A lot of people come up here and they thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. He didn't help me a bit. If it was up to him, Cesar Millan would be up here with that damn dog. So all I can say is, 'suck it, Jesus! This award is my God now'!
— Kathy Griffin
He saw a cross on a wall with another cross behind it, a shadow cross, the shadow of what God left behind when God was gone, the continued need for joy and beauty, a commitment to hope where there appeared to be none, and to grace in spite of everything.
— Richard Rayner, The Cloud Sketcher: A Novel
At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Imagination is evidence of the divine, and the divine is the imagination of evidence.
— Erik Banks
These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.
— W.E.B. Du Bois
I love you, my brother, whoever you are - whether you worship in a church, kneel in your temple, or pray in your mosque. You and I are children of one faith, for the diverse paths of religion are fingers of the loving hand of the one supreme being, a hand extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, eager to receive all.
— Kahlil Gibran
That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.
— Peter Rollins
And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles.Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.
— José Rizal, Noli Me Tángere
Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.
— Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History
A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I promise you it doesn’t matter what you believe, how strongly you live your beliefs, or how true your beliefs are. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks you are in the wrong. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks your beliefs are senseless or illogical. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks you have it all wrong. In fact, there are a lot of people in this world who do.
— Dan Pearce
Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord.
— Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
It's simpler to believe in a miracle.
— William Golding, The Spire
People who demand signs never believe them when they come.
— Michael Card
The supernatural is not as it claims, for it is inherently unnatural; it seeks to separate us from our natural world.
— Joe Iacovino, In the Shadow of the Sun
An institution is right or it is wrong. One that cannot accept dinosaur bones is one that cannot be trusted on more important matters.
— Fletcher Wortmann, Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
Dear Lord," she prayed, "please help me to handle all the work You've set before me. I can only do this with You at my side. Amen.
— Daniel  Patterson, One Chance
Principles are only tools in the hands of God they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful. 
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
Religion does not belong to God it belongs to the human reaction against mortality! 
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Religion has always been an irrelevant aspect if my life. The people here are either pissed of atheists, or religious freaks waiting for God to save them.
— Alina Baker
The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts. Religious addiction is a massive problem in our society. It may be the most pernicious of all addictions because it’s so hard for a person to break his delusion and denial. How can anything be wrong with loving God and giving your life for good works and service to mankind?
— John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
— Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney
But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.
— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur'an.
— Jim Al-Khalili
Unless a person can give reasons, there is, literally, no reason why anyone else should take that person seriously. But without reasons, all we are left with is emotional blackmail. We sometimes call it 'moral blackmail,' but it has nothing to do with morals, only with the implied juvenile threat of having a tantrum unless everyone else gives in.
— N.T. Wright
A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.
— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Socrates said the perfect society would be based on a great lie. People would be told that lie from the cradle, and they would believe it, because human beings need to make order out of chaos.
— Anne Frasier, Hush
The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.
— Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
The only relationship where you’ll never have your heart broken is the relationship between you and Allah.
— little_adam
That was rather interesting,' Mercer said as he filled his coffee mug and passed the thermal carafe to John. 'What do you say for dinner? "Blessed be the serial killers, or else the devil would have no one to torment.
— Lynn Viehl, Dark Need
The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.
— Jonathan Haidt
The only way of life satisfying the need of all times must be motivated by incentives and rewards – materially, morally and spiritually because motivation for work is produced by incentives and rewards only, an aspect built into the fundamental specification of human nature itself. Any prescription not recognising this important aspect of life is bound to fail in the life-styles of human beings.
— Mohammed Ali Muhiyaddin, A Comparative Study of the Religions of Today
I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.
— Ellis Peters, The Leper of Saint Giles
God does not bring two people together for the benefit of just one
— Rosemary West
As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.
— Teju Cole, Open City
Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)
— Jonathan Haidt
Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.
— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
I pray every single moment of my life not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. 
— Susan B. Anthony
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
— Robert Anton Wilson
Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.
— James Madison
A lost person or article is still what it is, still valuable in itself, but in the wrong place, disconnected from its purpose and unable to be or do whatever it is intended to be or do.
— David Winter, What's in a Word
I've always privately suspected that Jesus is in favor of revolutionaries, seeing as how he was a bit of one himself.
— G.N. Chevalier, Bonds of Earth
You turn the light on, you get all kinds of bugs.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
When God saw fit to bestow such a gift, a man with any sense didn’t ask questions.
— Catherine Anderson, Annie's Song
All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason
Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.
— Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
Our only business is to love God, not to ask God for our necessities.
— A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, The Science of Self-Realization
Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
— Norman G. Finkelstein, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, “the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad
— Huston Smith, The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble at all if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Disgusted by the abuses to which it led, humanity repressed Christianity by which it had so long been dominated. Repressed, but not eliminated. Herein lies, I believe, the essence of the tragedy of modern times. The modern man lives as if Christianity were a negligible hypothesis with no relation to the concrete realities of the world and society. And yet at the bottom of his heart this man remains impregnated with Christianity, so that he lives in a state of perpetual ambivalence with regard to it.
— Paul Tournier, The Whole Person in a Broken World
Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.
— Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, ... emergent, unfinished Christian
Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.
— William Sloane Coffin Jr.
the only unfailing guide I’ve ever found through the innumerable blind alleys of my life as a writer, man, husband, father, citizen, steward, or believer, is the love burning in my heart. for me, prayer is about one thing: making contact with that love. though it burns in there like a candle flame, hot, bright, beautiful, love’s flame is so fragile… keeping one’s love burning, and living in accord with that burning: this, to me, is prayer.
— David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays; Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.
— J.I. Packer, Knowing God
For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It wasn't until I was beginning to do Star Trek that the subject of religion arose. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, "No, we don't.
— Gene Roddenberry
It is said that peace is the basic tenet of all religion. Yet it is in the name of religion that there has been so much disturbance, bloodshed and persecution. It is indeed a pity that even at the close of the twentieth century we've had to witness such atrocities because of religion. Flying the flag of religion has always proved the easiest way to crush to nothingness human beings as well as the spirit of humanity.
— Taslima Nasrin, Lajja: Shame
[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
— Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen... go wrong
— George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman in the Great Game
We are all tricked. We think that religion tells us what to believe; but it doesn't, it is telling us what not to believe. Atheism is not the absence of religion; atheism is the most undiluted form of religion: it tells us not to believe in anything at all. Atheists hate the religious and the religious hate atheists, but this is only a deception! We are all deceived! There is only one boat and we are all in it! All at the same time!
— C. JoyBell C.
Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Neither Emma's tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.
— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
— William James
On your quest to spirituality it is often required to suspend your rationality but true spirituality asks that you enhance your rationality. 
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
In fact, I don’t understand religion at all and as far as I can see the only thing it does is hasten the slaughter of people who generally seem to be minding their own business.
— Beth McMullen, Original Sin
El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Culture is religion externalized.
— Douglas W. Phillips
Do you order righteousness of the people and forget yourselves while you recite the Scripture? Then will you not reason?
— Qur'an
When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he exposed the world to a momentous discovery . For the first time in history, human beings were seen not as creatures of divine origin, but instead, as a product of nature, an animal like every other on the planet. Imagine yourself back in that amazing year. The day before Darwin’s book was published, you wake up thinking yourself the image of God; the next morning you realize you have the face of a monkey. Not everybody immediately embraced this rude demotion from god to goat.
— Jeff Schweitzer, Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World
In BANKSY we trust.
— Colin Tegerdine, You Can't Google Life
It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
if you truly want to know why I'm helping you, you won't get any easy answers. It's not because I believe in the goodness of humankind. It's not because I believe God and the rest of the monsters are evil. I only wish to have the capacity to change. To know that we have the ability to take a different direction than the one presented to us. That is more important than good and evil. Than life or death.
— Autumn Christian, The Crooked God Machine
Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.”“McLuhanesque?”“Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.”“In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?”“Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Assim é, mas a vantagem da igreja é que, embora às vezes o não pareça, ao gerir o que está no alto, governa o que está em baixo.
— José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
Mary had been chosen, “favored” by God. But what a strange blessing. It brought with it none of the ideals or goals that so consume our daily striving. Today many assume that those whom God favors will enjoy the things we equate with a good life: social standing, wealth and good health. Yet Mary, God’s favored one, was blessed with having a child out of wedlock who would later be executed as a criminal. Acceptability, prosperity, and comfort have never been the essence of God’s blessing
— R. Alan Culpepper
As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your mattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights
— Ephrem the Syrian
If we want to set out on the aruous search for the truth, we must all summon up the courage to leave the lines along which we have thought until now and as the first step begin to doubt everything that we previously accepted as correct and true. Can we still afford to close our eyes and stop up our ears because new ideas are supposed to be heretical and absurd?
— Erich von Däniken, Chariots of The Gods
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
— Martin Amis, The Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11
There is a sort of mental treasonThat smothers dreams outside of reason
— Mike Corbett, Laughter of the Damned
Just as the Torah and Bible teach concern for those in distress, the Koran instructs all Muslims to make caring for widows, orphans, and refugees a priority.
— Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time
Belief is otiose reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands. 
— Martin Amis, The Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11
I see no reason why church services have to be standard. I've discussed this with the man who used to be a pastor here at the Methodist Church in Sebastopol. I told him I saw no reason why, on a certain Sunday morning, if a minister has felt during the week the burden of a topic upon his heart and he knows that it is going to take more than the standard twenty minutes to discuss this thing, why he can't rise at the beginning of the service and say 'I have something of special importance this morning so let's sing just one song, and if you'll forgive me, I think I'm going to need about an hour to explain it to you.' I think the congregation would appreciate his candor and give him their attention. If, on the other hand, he does not feel that a definite message has been given him, why not admit it from the pulpit and say, 'This morning, I'm not going to try to make up something to fill the time. We'll sing a few extra hymns and go home!' Why do the services have to begin and end at the same time, and why does everything have to be so rigid?
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.
— Stephen King, Desperation
We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
this is her body this is her blood
— Saul Williams, , said the shotgun to the head.
Verily I say unto you all: Arise and shine forth, that thy light may be a standard for the nations.
— Doctrine and covenants 115:5
I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
I think we place the wrong emphasis upon examples, that we're treading on very weak ground when we set ourselves up as examples for others to become religious. If people are going to look at me for religious guidance, then I think they're looking in the wrong place.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
But [he] had lost god, and all his family and friends were staying behind with his imaginary friend. A silly dream goes away and takes with it your whole real life.
— Penn Jillette, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales
The terrible error in the course of human civilization is undoubtedly the defective judgment that allowed religious authorities usurp the foundation of societal morality, in which all collective ethics of humankind must take a cause. This appalling blunder is comparable only to assigning the leper exclusive franchise to run beauty clinics in the society; this can only lead to cycles upon cycles of common infection syndrome.
— Adebowale Ojowuro, Echoes of Common Sense
I fear one day I'll meet God, he'll sneeze and I won't know what to say
— Ronnie Shakes
I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Die Menschen tun das Böse nie so vollständig und begeistert, wie wenn sie es aus religiöser Überzeugung tun.
— Umberto Eco, Il cimitero di Praga
Mrs. Joe war eine sehr reinliche Hausfrau, doch sie verstand sich ausnehmend gut darauf, ihre Reinlichkeit bequemer und unerträglicher zu machen, als jeder Schmutz gewesen wäre. Die Reinlichkeit ist der Gottesfurcht verwandt, und manche verfahren mit ihrer Religion ganz genauso.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
A halo is a cock ring for the soul.
— Corey DuFour
Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
— Aldous Huxley, Island
I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
— H.P. Lovecraft
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
— Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will
In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. All the praises and thanks be to Allah, the Lord of the 'Alamin (mankind, jinns and all that exists). The Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. The Only Owner of the Day of Recompense (i.e. the Day of Resurrection) You (Alone) we worship, and You (Alone) we ask for help. Guide us to the Straight Way... The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger, nor of those who went astray.(The Qur'an- Surah Al-Fatihah)
— Anonymous
This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that anyone is entirely destitute of virtue, nor that human nature is equal in itself, nor that man’s spirit in inactive, and much less does it mean that the body is dead. What is does mean is that since the fall, man rests under the curse of sin, that he is actuated by wrong principles, and that he is wholly unable to love God, or to do anything meriting salvation. His corruption is extensive, but not necessarily intensive. It is in this sense that man, since the fall, is utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, wholly inclined to all evil. He possesses a fixed bias of the will against God, and instinctively and willingly and turns to evil. He is an alien by birth, and a sinner by choice. The inability under which he labors is not an inability to exercise volition, but an inability to be willing to exercise holy volitions. And it is this phase of it which led Luther to declare that ‘free will’ is an empty term, whose reality is lost; and a lost liberty, according to my grammar, is no liberty at all.
— Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination
Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.
— Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
People didn't really like McDonald's, same as her mum didn't really like Catholicism, but when you were new in town, at least it was a known quantity. So that'll be a Quarter-Pounder and a Communion Wafer meal-deal to go.
— Christopher Brookmyre, Pandaemonium
When I hear that "Possession is the grave of love," I remember that a religion may begin with the resurrection.
— F.H. Bradley
That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.
— K.W. Jeter
I had never been into society; for me the world was the enclosure of the college and the seminary. I had a vague knowledge that there was a something called woman, but I never dwelt upon the subject; I was absolutely innocent. I saw my infirm old mother only twice a year; that was the extent of my connection with the outside world.
— Théophile Gautier, Clarimonde
Mujahadah adalah kunci petunjuk, tidak ada kunci petunjuk selain mujahadah
— حجة الإسلام أبي حامد محمد الغزالي
La historia no ha cambiado. Hace mil anos ellos eran los duenos del mundo. Hoy en dia lo siguen siendo. Claro, lo tienen que compartir con los grandes magnates de la tierra, esos que controlan el petroleo, las drogas, la tecnologia y por supuesto la television y la radio. La Iglesia domina los miedos y la promesa de la salvacion; las grandes empresas tambien manipulan los miedos y los paliativos para estos: la satisfaccion de las necesidades basicas - y las no tan basicas que hoy en dia parecen primordiales: carro, casa, belleza y entretenimiento - , una via directa al consimismo. Ambos en busca de lo mismo, la minipulacion del pueblo que los lleva a la gallina de los huevos de oro: el dinero de las masas. No es causalidad que la gente no quiera pensar. La Iglesia se encargo por siglos de esto, evitando la lectura de cualquier cosa que no fuese su religion. Desde Aristoteles, Ovidio, Pitagoras, Platon, Socrates, Antistenes, Heraclito, hasta Voltaire, Huxley, Hesse, Sade, Maquiavelo, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Dumas, entre otros, fueron censurados.
— Antonio Guadarrama, Cóatl: el misterio de la serpiente
The story Grandpa told us helped me realize that people cannot be divided into groups by ethnicity, religion, or any other feature, only into groups of good, bad, and indifferent people.
— Savo Heleta, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia
...I take the view that God, in his infinite wisdom, didn't bother to spring for two joints - heaven and hell. They're the same place, but heaven is when you get everything you want and you meet Mommy and Daddy and your best friends and you all have a hug and a kiss and play your harps. Hell is the same place - no fire and brimstone - but they just all pass by and don't see you. There's nothing, no recognition. You're waving, "It's me, your father," but you're invisible. You're on a cloud, you've got your harp, but you can't play with nobody because they don't see you. That's hell.
— Keith Richards, Life
For Hell and the foul fiend that rulesGod's everlasting fiery jails(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,Are senseless stories, idle tales,Dreams, whimseys, and no more.
— John Wilmot, The Complete Poems
Biblical, Talmudic, or Koranic literalists remind me of children wrinkling their noses at Belon oysters and asking for more Chef Boy-E-Dee. They want the world to be as simple as they are.
— Tim Kreider, Twilight of the Assholes
Many Buddhist temple priests regard their parishioners as possessions and fear their departure as a diminishing of assets.
— Kentetsu Takamori
All my life I have preserved in the depths of my heart a live faith in my Creator, the Defender of the World, in His Sanctifying Grace and in the expiatory sacrifice of Christ our Saviour, but never have I agreed that true religion demands outward manifestations.
— Valery Bryusov, The Fiery Angel
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion. - Abraham Lincoln
— Bruce Weinstein, Life Principles: Feeling Good by Doing Good
As long as we were living in the spirit we would continue to be blessed
— Crystal Flanagan, 10 Seconds from Glory
Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just
— Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo
An understanding of Jesus is not a mere matter of intelligence. He has to be accepted by faith.
— Lloyd C. Douglas
I shouldn't be surprised. Catholicism is the ultimate loophole religion (sin, confess, repeat), so it makes sense that a priest would know better than anyone how to work the angles. Still, when you go to confession and say, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," you don't expect him to say, "So, who hasn't?
— Marc Acito, Attack of the Theater People
You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.
— Paul Graham
Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.
— Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World
You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness. (p. 146)
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.
— Michael Crichton
It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions... The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.
— Mark Twain
If you wish to stand and progress as you ought, hold yourself an exile and a pilgrim on the earth.
— Thomas à Kempis
But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.” (161)
— Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization
How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't speak to that. What I do know? This is your story.
— Leanna Renee Hieber, The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker
I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Love is the theme of all religions but making it commercial is satanic”.
— Amit Abraham
Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.
— Hans Küng
As soon as we got back I ran upstairs and told everyone the story, thus telling everyone the alarm code, thus breaking one of the Ten Commandments when I lied and said I’d keep the code a secret. As I’ve known for a long, long time now, hell is going to be totally fucking worth it.
— Sarah Royal, The Book Bindery
It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.
— Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod
In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake. Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors
— James Reston Jr.
Religio", as we know, harks back to a word (re-ligio) meaning "bond" and that is precisely what the anarch rejects. He does not go in for Moses with the Ten Commandments or, indeed, for any prophets. Nor does he wish to hear anything concerning gods or rumors about them, except as a historian - or unless they appear to him. That is when the conflicts begin.So, if I state, "in order to pray," I am following an innate instinct that is no weaker than the sexual drive - in fact, even stronger. The two are alike insofar as foul things can happen when they are suppressed.
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
I do not believe that to be religious in the best, authentic sense a man has to destroy his love life and mummify himself, body and soul.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
— Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate