c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I didn’t say anything
—  I could find no words that would express the swirled chaos of emotions inside me. So I just watched him go right out the door.
It's more than words & somehow more than actions could ever show. It's hard to explicate this feeling I have for you, but it's one I could live out the rest of my days trying to make you understand.
— David Reeves, In My Opinion
Intellect is the virtue of ignoring one’s emotions’ attempt to contaminate one’s opinions.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Music has the power to stop time. When I listen to songs, I'm transported back to the moment of their birth, which is sometimes even before the moment of my birth. Old songs, rock or soul or blues, still connect with me because the human emotions in them, whether jealousy or rage or hope, are recognizably similar to the emotions that I'm feeling now. But I'm feeling all of them, all the time, and so the songs act like a chemical process that isolates certain feelings at certain times: maybe one song helps illuminate the jubilation and one helps illuminate the sorrow and one helps illuminate the resignation. Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.
— Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
Jealousy knows no logic, nor does it respect reciprocity.
— Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace
In one of his darker moments, the irony started him laughing and he couldn't stop, and the sounds that came from him, before finally tapering into sobs, were so far from mirth they might have been the forced inversion of laughter-like a soul pulled inside out to reveal its rawest meats.
— Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight
Eisenhower on Patton: "Fundamentally, he is so avid for recognition as a great commander that he won't with ruthlessly suppress any habit that will jeopardize it.
— Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace
Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.
— Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
There is always a TRUTH to be revealed in any situation where your emotions have shifted.
— Molly Friedenfeld, The Book of Simple Human Truths
A successful man never allows his faulty of discrimination and judgement to be distributed by the rising tides of his emotions.
— Gian Kumar
Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The act of sex is healthy, normal, God-given. It's the emotions and entitlement that everyone attaches to it that is harmful.
— Alessandra Torre, Blindfolded Innocence
I also know I'm not going to stay away. I'm going to grab onto her and let myself get cut. I'm good at pain. I'm good at bleeding, emotionally and physically.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
I know it’s hard for you to allow yourself to feel this. You've gone so long training yourself to block the feelings and emotions out any time someone touches you.
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
If you don't feel an overwhelming sense of emotion when you listen to music, then you're listening to the wrong kind.
— Jennifer Salaiz, Poisonous Pleasure
...emotions fly humans toward art
— Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
Every arena of life intersects with what's going on in our hearts. Everything passes through on its way to wherever it's going. Everything.
— Andy Stanley, Enemies of the Heart: Breaking Free from the Four Emotions That Control You
Don’t, Mom.” I begin walking toward her, but I can see the mist forming in her eyes. “No, no, no.” By the time I reach her, it’s too late. She’s bawling. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s crying. Not because it makes me emotional, but because it annoys the hell out of me. And it’s awkward.
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Happiness is not always the answer let the other emotions out is sometimes what is needed
— Michael  Burgess
Ah, yes. That. The sin of being happy or excited. According to my father, we must guard carefully against such things. According to my father, these emotions are the equivalent of dancing on out fifth-floor window ledge. Clearly inviting a nasty fall.
— Catherine Ryan Hyde, Chasing Windmills
I have never counted on someone to take care of my emotions for me.
— Mary Mihalic, Made to Make It
His rules were thus: One, resist when beneficial to the cause. Two, dignity before humiliation. Three, don’t show true emotions.
— Courtney Kirchoff, Jaden Baker
I think poor poetry writing skills are excused when you’re simply trying to flush out emotions.
— Katie Kiesler, 22 and Single: A Coming of Age Story...in Progress
I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.
— Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words
The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
— Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82
There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.
— Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.
— V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
Tell me I'm not crazy," He said. I couldn't do that. I was nowhere near sane enough at the moment to advise anyone else on rational behavior.
— Cora Carmack, Losing It
Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.
— Cass R. Sunstein, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done
My relationship with him was defined by these complex emotions, this mixture of gratitude and resentment.
— Otsuichi, ZOO
The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
O how can wicked men seem so steady and untouched with such black hearts, while poor innocents stand like malefactors before them!
— Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
Man is slave of emotions when they arise, and master of them when they don't.
— Raheel Farooq
Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
...two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.
— Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
It’s not that I didn’t understand or believe the gospel before. I did. But the truth of the gospel hadn’t moved from my mind to my heart. There was a huge gap between my intellect and my emotions. The Puritan Jonathan Edwards likened his reawakening to the gospel to a man who had known, in his head, that honey was sweet, but for the first time had that sweetness burst alive in his mouth.
— J.D. Greear, Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary
She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done.
— Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
Asking someone to deny their own inner reality causes further rupture.
— Elaine Margolin
The sudden appearance of pain and pressure are not indicative of an injury, but of the presence of suppressed emotions.
— Heidi DuPree, The Other Medicine That Really Works: How Energy Medicine Can Help You Heal in Body, Mind, and Spirit
It is hard for people to think clearly because their emotional needs keep getting in the way. The trick is to make thinking clearly an emotional need.
— George Hammond
All she wanted was a breathing space in which to hurt.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
The hardest thing of all is when pain is hidden behind a mask of calm.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch
Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
It is not what happens to you that matters
—  it is how you feel about it that does.
I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
— Tara Brach
Amal,I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.
— David Nicholls, One Day
I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.
— Clive  Bell
Love was something different. Love was pure delight, a fountain of emotions, sensual delights, and enjoying spending time together.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Day Watch
Offstage, I couldn't put things into words, and that was the one thing I'd always been able to rely on. Putting my feelings into words and praying they wouldn't be able to get out again.
— Carrie Fisher, Shockaholic
That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.
— Ryū Murakami, Audition
The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
Frustration, despair, angst, anxiety, hurt, grief, unhappiness, envy, jealousy, and all the other painful emotions are catalysts of change in our lives. They motivate us to do things differently, to change our status quo.
— Kate Levinson, Emotional Currency: A Woman's Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Money
Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
Of necessity she went further in aversion than she had gone in love, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love but to her disappointed hopes.
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
Because people are more than emotions. People have thoughts and reasons for doing things.
— Veronica Rossi, Under the Never Sky
I don't think I've ever dared to write down what I see in the ruins of me, or tell in any detail the scars and all their secrets.
— Ashly Lorenzana
there were worse things than feeling guilty, like feeling dead.
— Lori Brighton, The Mind Readers
Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions.
— Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
She needed to get out of there. Her brains, thankfully, were still safely in her skull, but her emotions were splattered on the pavement.
— Francine Pascal, Sam
Our senses and emotions are the great source of inspiration for creating compelling and interesting art pieces (books included). Each art piece, be it a book, a song, a painting, a photograph or a product should touch our senses and evoke emotions. Emotionless art lacks purpose and interest.
— Serafima
I hate you!''That's good. Hate is a passionate emotion.
— Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse
By practicing the virtues we cultivate the soil from which healthy emotions sprout
—  by letting go of our character defects we drain the swamp in which diseased emotions breed. – p. 52
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
— George Carlin
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
— Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Agnostics are just atheists without balls.
— Stephen Colbert, I Am America
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Sometimes when I'm faced with an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve, and when we have finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him if he believes there's a cook.
— Ronald Reagan
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
— Gene Roddenberry
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
— Quentin Crisp, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp
If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a precious life. It's a beautiful life. Its something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you're religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don't live this life to the full because you think you're going to get another one. That's an awfully negative way to live a life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully
— Richard Dawkins
Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?
— David Hume
You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.
— Ricky Gervais
If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.
— John C. Wright
Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. 
— Dorothy Day
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciproc
— Voltaire
And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
— Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.
— Mark Twain
Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.
— Ayn Rand, We the Living
Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked.With your own voice,' he said.
— Erica Jong, Sappho's Leap
But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said.On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop.But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?'Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.
— Erica Jong, Sappho's Leap
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded pro
— James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison Volume 3
The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
— Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.
— Madalyn Murray O'Hair
By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were....Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.
— Erwin Schrödinger, A Life of Erwin Schrödinger
You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.
— Richard Jeni
On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.
— Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.
— Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & de
— William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.
— Denis Diderot
Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.
— Erwin Schrödinger, A Life of Erwin Schrödinger
If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays
I'm a Skeptic. And I'm a Journalist. I look up things in the library—a lot! I believe in the motto of Missouri, the 'Show-me, don't just blow me' state. I need evidence. I need demonstrations. I need show-and-tell. Even though I pray to God every once in a while, especially when I'm in trouble—which for most guys my age is every 28 days—I still think deeply about the issues and don't automatically jump to a religious or mystical answer to questions. I am, by nature, doubtful about the existence of God, and even whether He is a He or a Her. I don't believe in New Age stuff. For me, 'Past Life Regression' means not calling a girl after she gives me her phone number. Sure I own a lucky rabbit's foot, a lucky penny, a lucky 4-leaf clover and a lucky horeshoe [sic], and a pair of lucky underwear and several pairs of lucky socks that I only wash every seven days. But under it all I am a died–in-the-wool skeptic.
— Earl Lee, Raptured: The Final Daze of the Late, Great Planet Earth
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays
As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Sex has become more and more attractive because of its condemnation by priests
— Osho
You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is “I don’t know”.
— Penn Jillette, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales
Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around. He had done it through sheer terror, and who could blame him? Unfortunately he had made too good a job. The god he had invented was just as cruel and careless as man himself. Not a deity to whom one should seriously address a prayer.
— Richard Herley
Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays
Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself.
— Emma Goldman, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
So much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God is somewhat bewildering, as no one appears to be nearly as excited about a similar absence of belief in unicorns, vampires, werewolves, astrology, nation-building, or the Labor Theory of Value. Nor is anyone dedicating much of their time to writing books and giving speeches at universities and conferences with the avowed goal of convincing others not to believe in them either.
— Vox Day
You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [....] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali
If god created man in his own image, how come I'm not invisible?
— David Powers
Skepticism is my nature. Free Thought is my methodology. Agnosticism is my conclusion. Atheism is my opinion. Humanitarianism is my motivation.
— Jerry DeWitt
An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.
— Francis G. Thompson
ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term, it admits of no paltering and no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech.
— Chapman Cohen
Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
— Sidney Hook, The Quest for Being
Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, and compels Theism to reason for its existence.
— George Holyoake
Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.
— Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
What the mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography: Toward Freedom
It means that your birth, with all your particulars, is a wildly improbable event, and hence precious. You won the sweepstakes by being born at all. Think of all the wallflower sperm and egg cells. You made it, buddy. Whew! What a staggering wonder! What a thing to rejoice in! The lottery wasn't fixed! God didn't rig it! You won fair and square! What a miracle!
— Robert M. Price
All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.
— Voltaire
That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
— Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Materialism sets us free from sin-by proving that there is no such thing as sin. There's just antisocial behavior, which we can control with measures like laws and educational programs.
— Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds
The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate.
— Annie Besant, The Atheistic Platform: Twelve Lectures by Chales Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, Alice Bradlaugh, A. B. Moss, C. C. Cattell, G. Standring, E. Aveling, D.Sc.
But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.
— Douglas Wilson, Is Christianity Good for the World?
...for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman.--To be sure she must be an atheist!
— Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement betweenProfessor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shallresolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.
— Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
The trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything. In this century, 'anything' has included Hitler, Stalin and Mao, authors of the great genocidal madnesses of our time.
— Charles Krauthammer
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
— Lalla Ward
For those in love with an illusion often refuse to accept reality
— Sanal Edamaruku
Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ
I pity the atheist, for he can never fully appreciate a sinful pleasure.
— James Rozoff
Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays
(Marlowe's) Faustus stubbornly reverts to his atheistic beliefs and continues his elementary pagan re-education ~ the inferno to him is a 'place' invented by men.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World: Volume I
Christianity also stands in opposition to intellectual, as well as physical, health. To doubt becomes sin. 'Faith means not wanting to know what it true' a description that strikes me as stunning and quite exact.
— Robert Sheaffer, The Making of the Messiah
The world holds two classes of men--intelligent men without religion, and religious men withoutintelligence.poet
— ~ Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri, 973-1057, Syrian
When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex.
— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.
— William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design
At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army - a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon the Salvation Army.
— A.E. Coppard, Dusky Ruth: And Other Stories
As Peter Berger has noted, the strategy of apologizing for Christian faith by trying to demonstrate its social utility is always eventually self-liquidating. Sooner of later people realize that a great many of the supposedly practical and secular benefits of the Christian religion can be had more easily without religion...The logic of practical atheism may well be more deeply ingrained in the evangelical tradition than conservatives perhaps have realized.
— Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist
But no sooner had morning broken than he took hold of his whip and ceremoniously stepped out to address his slaves. Each blow was liberating, it was like unshaking proof of the great lie of God’s existence.
— Juhani Peltonen
I am empty only in the sense that there is nothing fixed or intrinsically real at the core of my identity as a person.Recognition of such emptiness therefore liberates one to change and transform oneself. And this, it seems, is precisely what the Jungian theory of individuation describes, yet in a language that is affirmative rather than negative.
— Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
The gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.
— Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
Another problem with the view that you don’t need God to believe that murder is wrong is that a lot of people haven’t shared your view. And you don’t have to go back very far in history to prove this. In the twentieth century millions of people in Communist societies and under Nazism killed about one hundred million people—and that doesn’t count a single soldier killed in war. So, don’t get too confident about people’s ability to figure out right from wrong without a Higher Authority.
— Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code
If you can't show it, you don't know it.
— Aron Ra
No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now.Moreover, the Buddhist teachings and practices that had the most impact upon me did so precisely because they heightened my sense of being fully alive in and responsive to this world.
— Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
The nihilist looks around at everything and comes to terms with what seems to be obvious. The sun is one tiny dying star in an enormous universe. One day the sun will burn out or explode, destroying us all. The earth is a molten rock that could either be blown up by nuclear weapons or an erratic comet. We are one of the seven billion nameless faceless ones currently living on this rock. What does our existence matter to this rock floating around a dying star within the expanse of an enormous universe? Not much.
— Jon Morrison, Clear Minds & Dirty Feet: A Reason to Hope, a Message to Share
The First Amendment contradicts the First Commandment.
— Aron Ra
She had no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.
— Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
Atheism is the philosophical equivalent of a fish denying the existence of land because he lacks the means to experience it.
— J.Adam Snyder
Doing good for the sake of a heavenly reward is not an act of good, but a business transaction.
— J.Adam Snyder
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist.
— Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
God is not here, Hannah said to herself; and made a small cross upon her breastbone, against her blasphemy.
— James Agee, A Death in the Family
God is a hoax.Religion is a scam.Religious politics is a slaughter house.
— Vidyut
For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
You must abolish your slavery yourselves. Do not depend for its abolition upon god or a superman. Remember that it is not enough that a people are numerically in the majority. They must be always watchful, strong and self-respecting to attain and maintain success.We must shape our course ourselves and by ourselves.
— B.R. Ambedkar
But the most catastrophic display of misogyny in all religion lies at the very heart of Christianity—in the story of the Virgin Mary. That Jesus was born of a virgin is a fundamental narrative upon which all Christianity is based. It is one that is carried through to Islam, where the Quran holds Mary in great esteem.The implications of this have historically been devastating to women....Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ as a virgin, with no man ever having touched her. She is therefore described as pure, chaste, undefiled, innocent—being the product of an “immaculate conception” herself (as per Catholic doctrine), and now hosting God’s immaculate son in her unblemished womb.What does this mean for women who are touched by men? Are their conceptions corrupted? Are their characters and bodies now impure or unchaste? Have they been “defiled”?...Was all of Mary’s beauty, sanctity, chastity, and innocence confined to her vagina?Fetishizing Mary’s virginity—as Christians and Muslims both do—is a sickness that directly leads to a dangerous, unnatural glamorization of celibacy and sexual repression.”Excerpt From: Ali A. Rizvi. “The Atheist Muslim.” iBooks.
— Ali A. Rizvi, The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason
The keystone… some have called God, some Brahma, some Zeus… some even IAO… but in truth, O seeker, it is Thy-SELF.
— Aleister Crowley
The Jewish people trusted themself to do nothing except that what was commanded by God; they were without will even in external things; the authority of religion extended itself even to their food. The Christian religion, on the other hand, in all external things made humankind dependent on itself, i.e. placed in it what Judaism placed out of itself. … Thus do things change. What yesterday was still religion is no longer such to-day; and what to-day is atheism, to-morrow will be religion.
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Atheism and traditional institutions of the Church are the polar sides of the same marasmus: either of them is badly lacking the truth.
— Sahara Sanders, INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels
The difference between an atheist and a person of faith? One additional religion in the crazy column. You believe that all religions except yours are crazy. I believe that all religions including yours are crazy.
— Quentin R. Bufogle, Horse Latitudes
People say nothing can solve the Middle East problem. Not mediation, not arms, not financial aid. I say there is Something. Atheism. Suddenly everyone would be looking at each other thinking, ‘What the fuck were we doing? That was insane! Why are we all wearing these ridiculous hats? Were we drunk?
— Frankie Boyle, My Shit Life So Far
The Jewish people trusted thmself to do nothing except that what was commanded by God; they were without will even in external things; the authority of religion extended itself even to their food. The Christian religion, on the other hand, in all external things made humankind dependent on itself, i.e. placed in it what Judaism placed out of it. … Thus do things change. What yesterday was still religion is no longer such to-day; and what to-day is atheism, to-morrow will be religion.
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
— Francis Bacon, The Essays
People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis.
— Sam Harris
For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith.And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent.This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism.Faith vs. Fact. p. 220
— Jerry A. Coyne
Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
[This philosophy] does not … regard the pen as the only fit organ for the revelation of truth, but the eye and ear, the hand and foot
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
[T]here is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject … [T]he predicates are not accidents, but express the essence of the subject … [T]he essence of religion … conceives and affirms a profoundly human relation as divine relations[.]
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
I by no means say … God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the Word of God is nothing, … . I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them[.]
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
[T]hese days illusion only is scared, truth profane. … [S]acredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to highest degree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, … for it has been substituted … the appearance of religion[.]
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith.And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent.This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism.
— Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible
The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.
— Nicolás Gómez
Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near-miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures. Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice.
— Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
I don’t think you can just choose to believe in God. You either do or you don’t, and no matter what camp you’re in, it would take something life-changing to truly lead you into the other one.
— Paula Stokes, This is How it Happened
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
— H.L. Mencken
I am not much given to profanity, but when I am sorely aggravated and vexed in spirit I declare to you that it comes as such a relief to me, such a solace to my troubled soul, and brings me such Heavenly peace to every now and then allow a word of phrase to escape my lips which can serve me no other earthly purpose, seemingly, other than to render emphatic my otherwise mildly expressed ideas.
— Col. Robert G. Ingersoll
The good life is that which succeeds in existing for the moment, without reference to past or future, without condemnation or selection, in a state of absolute lightness, and in the finished conviction that there is no difference therefore between the instant and eternity.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a "hidden prejudice" in favor of the "beyond" at the expense of the "here and now" and this must be changed.(quoted from The Age of Atheists" by Peter Watson, p 25)
— Luc Ferry, L'Homme-Dieu Ou Le Sens de La Vie
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. Tosay that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is tosay they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels,no soul. I cannot reason otherwise .. . without plunginginto the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I amsatisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things whichare, without tormenting or troubling myself aboutthose which may indeed be, but of which I have noevidence.
— Thomas Jefferson
Where religion clashes with science is that religion makes smart people do stupid things.
— P.Z. Myers, The Happy Atheist
IF [GOD] HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism
Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.
— M.R. Carey, Fellside
Atheism is not against god, it is against the religious establishment who use god they have never seen or heard from to establish their influence over the minds of men.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
If you are a pastor there is no way you can lose faith without losing face, you are considered the devil incarnate by your former congregation
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
Question with boldness even the existence of aGod; because, if there be one, he must more approve ofthe homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
— Thomas Jefferson