c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I am accountable.I am correctable.I am transformable.Presenting myself a living sacrifice to God. By the love of God.By the word of God.Completely supplied in Christ Jesus.Unto all good works.
— Carlton T. Brown, Till Death Do We Shop
Every religion should be in favor of humankind.
— Santosh Kalwar
Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the Gospel than holy adulterers. The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness, but social holiness.
— John Wesley
Discipline imposed from the outside eventually defeats when it is not matched by desire from within.
— Dawson Trotman
Religion is a salve for confusion and misdirection.
— Robert F. Kennedy
Before creation I alone was, there was no other existence of the nature of cause and effect different from Me. After the creative cycle ends also, I alone exist. For, this universe is also Myself, and when everything is dissolved in its cause in Pralaya, what remains is only Myself.
— Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith, but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.
— Bede Griffiths
Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.
— Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?
Thank you for this precious day,These gifts you give to me,My heart so full of love for you,Sings praise for all I see,Oh, sing, for every mother's love,For every childhood tear,Oh, sing, for all the stars above,The peace beyond all fear
— John Denver
She is standing just behind you. Just behind your right shoulder."In the silence of the woods, Polly turned."I can't see her," she said."I am happy for you," said Wazzer, handing her the empty mug."But I didn't see anything," said Polly."No," said Wazzer. "But you turned around...
— Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.
— Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war.
— Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
Not only is this not love I think it is the most diabolical unfairness that was ever taught or devised. 
— Ruth Hurmence Green
Most Christians are like a man who was toiling along the road, bending under a heavy burden, when a wagon overtook him. The driver kindly offered to help him on his journey. He joyfully accepted the offer but, when he was seated, continued to bend beneath his burden, which he still kept on his shoulders. "Why do you not lay down your burden?" asked the kind-hearted driver. "Oh!" replied the man, "I feel that it is almost too much to ask you to carry me, and I could not think of letting you carry my burden too." And so Christian who have given themselves into the care and keeping of the Lord Jesus still continue to bend beneath the weight of their burdens and often go weary and heavy-laden throughout the whole length of their journey.
— Hannah Whitall Smith
Religion isn't best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom.
— David Dark
The bible when taken metaphorically, provides us the truth about god; but when taken literally, the bible provides as the truth about man.
— Joey Lawsin
He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room.The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.
— Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return
— Torah, Torah: The Five Books of Moses
To understand Jesus when he stated that he was the way, the truth and the life, one must first recognize his manner of a walk and believe firmly that his manner is true.
— The Tru Sum, Excerpts To Exodus
For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply 'today'...But you yourself are eternally the same. In your 'today' you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your 'today' you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before.
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight a holy war. Jihad! And certainly we could argue this out in the street, but I think, in the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution---it is not my solution. So I do not know what it is you would like me to say. Truth and firmness is one suggestion, though there are many people you can ask if that answer does not satisfy. Personally, my hope lies in the last days. The prophet Muhammad---peace be upon Him!---tells us that on the Day of Resurrection everyone will be struck unconscious. Deaf and dumb. No chitchat. Tongueless. And what a bloody relief that will be.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Scientology does not teach you. It only reminds you. For the information was yours in the first place.
— L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought
In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches.
— Frank Herbert, The White Plague
Spirituality is not adopting more beliefs and assumptions but uncovering the best in you.
— Amit Ray, Beautify your Breath - Beautify your Life
God is universal," spluttered the priest.The imam nodded strong approval. "There is only one God.""And with their one god Muslims are always causing troubles and provoking riots. The proof of how bad Islam is, is how uncivilized Muslims are,: pronounced the pandit."Says the slave-driver of the cast system," huffed the imam. "Hindus enslave people and worship dressed-up dolls.""They are golden calf lovers. They kneel before the cows," the priest chimed in."While Christians kneel before a white man! They are flunkies of a foreign god. They are nightmare of all nonwhite people.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire theft. They are mistaken.
— Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
The Australian Aboriginal cave paintings, from this period, are the first hints of religion that humans have as proof of religious behaviour. The caves in which the paintings are found date to 50,000 years ago through forensic geology and carbon dating. Most of the images found in their religious stories and ceremonies are depicted in these caves. We also have confirmation from the aborigines themselves that these images are their religious images. These paintings also are likely to be significant evidence for linking the use of Amanita Muscaria to its use 50,000 years ago. This is because 50,000 years ago was when humanity entered Australia and also because Amanita Muscaria produces religious like experiences.
— Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.
— Peter Watts, Maelstrom
The Ancestors were from Africa and entered into Australia 50,000 years ago. They would have eaten food from indigenous life from their area almost immediately. They harvest most of the day, and eat this food. The AM looks like a food source they already eat in Africa. It is highly likely they did eat it. This is still not enough to say it had connection to religion, but it is enough to say they ate it, in all probability. Forensic DNA shows again that they did eat it, as the retrovirus that was on Amanita Muscaria can only be transferred via consumption by humans and it is known that AM is a vector for this virus. Since they forage daily and consume what they forage it puts the consumption just around the time of 50,000 years ago.
— Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
(Prayer is) a fictitious consolation invented by those who have everything in order to keep those who have nothing contented. I belong to the bourgeoisie and I know the only reason my class bothers to show the lower classes that distant paradise full of ineffable pleasures that will one day be theirs is to divert attention from their own bulging coffers and from the abundance of their harvests.
— Eça de Queirós, The Mandarin and Other Stories
Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light. To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces.
— Keith Ablow, Denial
We may not play with the new theology even if we may think we can turn it to our advantage.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
If you can show people how to build castles, make sure you do not neglect building and nurturing your own.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas.
— Yann Martel
A basket of ripe fruit is holier than any prayer book.
— Marty Rubin
Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.
— Albert Camus
In our household doubts more troubling than these were suffered in silence. The spiritual void I have seen in so many of Istanbul's rich, Westernised, secularist families is evident in these silences. Everyone talks openly about mathematics, success at school, football and having fun, but they grapple with the most basic questions of existence - love,compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred - in trembling confusion and painful solitude. They light a cigarette, give their attention to the music on the radio, return wordlessly to their inner worlds.
— Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
Our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring democracy the tolerance it requires to survive
— Ronald Reagan
I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
If I told you to wish for good health, you would think I'm ridiculous; but when I exchange the word "wish" for the word "pray", you believe it can work. That is the disempowering delusion religions have brought us.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
In my experience ideology is a lot like religion it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world. 
— Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
Men-kind shared this world for but a blink, then, sadly, they became enlightened, found science and religion. The new world of men left little room for magic or the magical creatures of old. Earth’s first children were driven into the shadows by flame and cold iron, by man’s insatiable need of conquest.
— Brom, The Child Thief
Having a religion doesn’t make a person love or not love others. It doesn’t make a person accept or not accept others. It doesn’t make a person befriend or not befriend others.Being without a religion doesn’t make somebody do or be any of that either.No, what makes somebody love, accept, and befriend their fellow man is letting go of a need to be better than others.Nothing else.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificiently isolated from loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?
— Teju Cole, Open City
Let us see rather that like Janus—or better, like Yama, the Brahmin god of death—religion has two faces, one very friendly, one very gloomy...
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
The Tezuman Empire in the jungle valleys of central Klatch is known for it organic market gardens, its exquisite craftsmanship in obsidian, feathers and jade, and its mass human sacrifices in honor of Quezovercoatl, the Feathered Boa, god of mass human sacrifices.
— Terry Pratchett, Eric
Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.
— Joseph Campbell, Mythology and the Individual
Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.
— Dan Simmons, The Terror
St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?
— Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain him, especially the one called 'Christianity'.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does.
— Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney
If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.
— Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps
Spiritual fulfillment doesn't have to mean belief in a religion or disbelief in science. ... Whether one believes in an unseen, all-knowing force, or the wonder of science and the universe, or simply the beauty of the human spirit, nearly every one of feels an inner longing to feel part of something bigger than ourselves.
— Cesar Millan
Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Should we tolerate the blatant incorrectness of religion? Tolerating ignorance, superstition and stupidity will not provide for a healthy advancement of our society. Religion is cancer for modern thought, rationality, and even common sense.
— Odin Zeus McGaffer, Does God Get Diarrhea?: Flushing 4,000 Years of Lies, Myths, and Fairy Tales Down the Toilet
Strange to hear atheists say 'god' when having great sex.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.
— Iain Banks, The Business
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
— Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
There is a thought among some brands of theology that souls are waiting up in heaven to be born. Now how in the world anybody comes up with that is beyond me, and how you can be so sure of that is also beyond me. I always like to go back to Snoopy's theological writings, which he called, "Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong." And that's the way I feel. These things fascinate me, and I like to talk about them with other people, and hear what they think. But I'm always a little bit leery of people who are sure that they're right about things that nobody's ever been able to prove, and never will be able to prove.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
First-class religion teaches one how to love God without any motive. If I serve God for some profit, that is business-not love.
— A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, The Science of Self-Realization
I don't believe in school prayer. I think it's total nonsense...who is the teacher there that is going to have them pray? And is the teacher going to be Catholic or Mormon or Episcopalian or what? It just causes all sorts of problems. And what are the kids praying about anyway? Does it really matter, does praying in school...what are you doing it for? The whole thing just opens up all sorts of elements of discussion. I think it's crazy.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
If you ask the religious person "What do you believe in?" he will tell you about one thing. But if you ask him "What do you not believe in?" he will tell you about many, many things! And if you ask an atheist "What do you believe in?" he will say "Nothing." The only difference between an atheist and a religious person, is one thing. If one thing isn't there, there would be no difference at all! When I say I am losing my religion, I am not saying that I'm losing my belief; but I am saying that I'm losing my disbeliefs.
— C. JoyBell C.
Bliss and suffering, it seems, always go hand in hand.
— Kentetsu Takamori, You Were Born for a Reason: The Real Purpose of Life
What a wonderful world it would be if christians practiced Christianity.
— Brad Walsh
A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
— Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics
Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Nothing draws people more quickly away from religion than an open mind.
— Hemant Mehta
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics & Orthodoxy
Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
I do not like a high-organized church. I think that as soon as the congregation reaches a level of one hundred or so people, it is time to build a new church. As soon as the congregation gets to the point where you are not on fairly intimate terms with every other person in that church, then you have become a theater where people can attend services. I do not think you can attend a church service. Service is not something which is there to be viewed as if it were a play or a movie.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
....Charles laughingly observed,'Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.
— Craig Werner, Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.
— Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Myths are, in fact...neither primitive nor untrue. They are, rather, a kind of poetry that helps us make sense of the world and our place in it.
— Stephen H. Furrer
When our passion for the Great Commission, becomes our search for the Great Politician, we know we're lost.
— Wes Moore
Religion is for those who are scared of hell, and spirituality is for those who have been there.
— Bonnie Raitt
Jesus Christ says, 'Kill me and in 3 days, not only this temple, but all temples in the whole world will be out of business.' This is the most stunning thing any human being has ever said.
— Timothy J. Keller
There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.--"Wanda
— Ouida
Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion.
— Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
Whoever treads a path seeking knowledge, Allah will make easy for him the path to Paradise."(reported by Ibn Majah and others, fulfilling the conditions of Imam al Bukhari and Imam Muslim)
— Anonymous
The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
— Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Disciples and devotees…what are most of them doing? Worshipping the teapot instead of drinking the tea!
— Wei Wu Wei
Right now, I am in Fallujah. I am in Darfur. I am on Sixty-third and Park having dinner with Ellen Barkin and Ron Perelman... Right now, I'm on Lafayette and Astor waiting to hit you up for change so I can get high. I'm taking a walk through the Rose Garden with George Bush. I'm helping Donald Rumsfeld get a good night's sleep...I was in that cave with Osama, and on that plane with Mohamed Atta...And what I want you to know is that your work has barely begun. And what I want you to trust is the efficacy of divine love if practiced consciously. And what I need you to believe is that if you hate who I love, you do not know me at all. And make no mistake, "Who I Love" is every last one. I am every last one. People ask of me: Where are you? Where are you?...Verily I ask of you to ask yourself: Where are you? Where are you?
— Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
Christianity enhanced the notion of political and social accountability by providing a new model: that of servant leadership. In ancient Greece and Rome no one would have dreamed of considering political leaders anyone's servants. The job of the leader was to lead. But Christ invented the notion that the way to lead is by serving the needs of others, especially those who are the most needy.
— Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity
You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.
— Christopher Hitchens
Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
It doesn't matter how many drugs I take, I'm not fulfilled. This isn't satisfying. There's a spiritual hunger going on. Everybody feels it. If you don't feel it now, you will. Trust me. You will... Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's the real rebellion.
— Alice Cooper
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.
— David Mitchell
A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.
— Christopher Hitchens
the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don't deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.... When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.
— Dean Koontz, What the Night Knows
Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . .
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
So it is that God tugs at a pilgrim's sleeve telling him to remember that he is only human. He must be his own man, remain in exile, and belong to himself. He must pay attention to his own feelings and to the meaning of what he does, if he is to be for himself, and yet for others as well.
— Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage Of Psychotherapy Patients
Religion isn't the problem ignorance and hatred are. 
— Bruce Weinstein, Life Principles: Feeling Good by Doing Good
The Pope would have an easier job than the President of the United States in adopting a change of course. He has no Congress alongside him as a legislative body nor a Supreme Court as a judiciary. He is absolute head of government, legislator and supreme judge in the church. If he wanted to, he could authorize contraception over night, permit the marriage of priests, make possible the ordination of women and allow eucharistic fellowship with this Protestant churches. What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama?
— Hans Küng
Peygamber dedi: 'Kadın akıllılara ve gönül sahiplerine tam galip gelir. Cahillerse kadına üstün olur, çünkü onlar sert ve serkeş davranır.' İncelik, letafet ve insaf onlarda az bulunur, çünkü tabiatlarında hayvanlık galiptir. Sevgi ve incelik, insanlık vasfıdır. Öfke ve şehvet, hayvanlık vasfıdır. O, Hakk'ın ışığıdır; sevgili değil. O, sanki yaratıcıdır; yaratılmış değildir.
— Jalaluddin Rumi, Masnavi I Ma'navi
The existence of guilty sense is soimportant in education and religion.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.
— Leo Tolstoy
It was not enough that food aplenty was within Man’s grasp: he wanted more.It was not enough that prey surrendered themselves to Man according to the natural order: Man wanted to cook his prey. Man had discovered fire when lightning stuck and set a tree or two alight, but he was clumsy and greedy and stupid and could not keep the flame alive
— David  Bowles, Along the River: An Anthology of Voices from the Rio Grande Valley
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
— Thomas Paine
I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?
— Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
— C.S. Lewis
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life." Paul Tillich
— Paul Tillich
The devil himself can become beauty, so we are told, to corrupt mankind."(Marco)
— Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'.
— Christopher Hitchens
Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.
— Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
It is difficult to describe the peace that comes with giving yourself permission to know what you know. To have hard, complicated realities staring at you and be able to raise your head and look back at them with a steady gaze, scared maybe, grieved perhaps, but straight on and unwavering
— Valerie Tarico
...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?
— Albert Camus
The earth is but one country and Mankind its citizens.
— Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah
The most formidable chains are forged from beliefs. Ah, beliefs! Beliefs tear out the eyes and leave us blind and groping in the dark. If I believe in one proposition, I have become locked behind the door of that belief, and all other doors to learning and freedom, although standing open and waiting for me to enter, are now closed to me. If I believe in one God, one religion, yes, if I believe in God at all, if I have closed my mind to magic, to spirit, to salvation, to the unknown dimension that exist in the firmament, I have plunged my mind into slavery. Test all beliefs. Distrust all beliefs.
— Gerry Spence, Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life
Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.
— Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature
For myself I couldn't care less, but I have a lover. Not a partner, Susannah, or a friend or a significant euphemism, but the love of my life. And he believes. And I've watched him tie himself in knots, as he struggles to find a place for himself in texts that were written thousands of years ago, with the deliberate aim of excluding him.
— Michael Arditti, The Enemy of the Good
When it's all over and the dust from our Ancestors bodies and our own settle from the four winds only then will we see that we were here!
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Im Verlaufe nicht nur der ökonomischen, sondern auch der politischen Globalisierung kann das kardinale völkerrechtliche Prinzip der Nichteinmischung in Gefahr geraten. Besonders gilt dies für dasVerhältnis des Westens zur islamischen Kultur. Vornehmlich von meinem toten muslimischen Freunde Anwar as-Sadat habe ich den Respekt gegenüber anderen Religionen gelernt. Ich habe von ihm gelernt die gleichen Wurzeln von Judentum und Christentum und Islam. Und inzwischen habe ich ausserdem gelernt, dass Konfuzius, Sokrates oder Lao Tse und ebenso Zarathustra und Gautama Buddha ein halbes Jahrtausend, Moses oder Echnaton ein ganzes Jahrtausend vor Jesus von Nazareth gelebt haben - und dass sie wahrscheinlich deswegen doch nicht unglücklicher gewesen sind als wir Heutigen. Unter den globalisierten Umständen der heutigen Menschheit geziemt jedermann Respekt und Toleranz gegenüber den Kulturen der anderen.
— Helmut Schmidt, Sechs Reden
I never joined, but I used to go to church now and then. I liked it, because they always passed out plates of money at the end.
— A. Whitney Brown
Faith moves mountains. Religion strip-mines them.
— J.M. Williams
What if we changed the story that has been peddled to us over thousands of years by those religions that want to control us, that this life is merely a stepping stone to something better or something worse, and that we can only achieve the better by passing through the doors of their institutions and following their rules? What if we trash this arcane story which has caused so much suffering and hostility, and accept that we have already arrived in heaven and that there is nothing more gorgeous than here and now?
— Danny Scheinmann, Random Acts Of Heroic Love
Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there?'Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part.
— Iris Murdoch
when we look up, it widens our horizons. we see what a little speck we are in the universe, so insignificant, and we all take ourselves so seriously, but in the sky, there are no boundaries. No differences of caste or religion or race.
— Julia Gregson, East of the Sun
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
— C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Everybody was talking about the religious man who committed suicide. While no one in the monastery approved of the man's action, some say they admired his faith.Faith?" said the Master.He had the courage of his convictions, didn't he?"That was fanaticism, not faith. Faith demands a greater courage still: to reexamine one's convictions and reject them if they do not fit the facts.
— Anthony de Mello
No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.
— Stephen King, The Stand
Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest
— Alfred de Musset, Lorenzaccio
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation, and God's will, and a Christian Republic is born.
— Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
We are all born like Catholics . . . in limbo, without religion.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Every day and every night, I dance with Jesus Christ, Prophet Mohammad & all personal Gods: Krishna, Shiva & Buddha. You are welcome too !
— Santosh Kalwar
Sermons seldom convert sinners they sometimes goad them into more sin. 
— Salvador de Madariaga, Essays with a Purpose
All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption.
— Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
A struggle is a preparation for what is yet to come.-Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes
— Brenda "Saw Jesus+" Calloway-Miller, If You Want Your Life, You Have to Fight!: The Brenda Saw Jesus Story
Ask a true scientist a very profound question on his science, and he will besilent. Ask a true religious person a very simple question on his religion, and he will be frenzied.
— Kedar Joshi
When I encountered these haunting words from Franz Kafka, I realized exactly why this light sermon about the search for God had struck such a nerve: "Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written. Every second, without noticing, we pass by thousands of corpses and crimes. That's the routine of our lives.
— Stephen Kendrick, Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes
The problem is that one man's superstition is another man's religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, ... while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as worshiping an equally absurd form of the supernatural.
— David Gibson
He wrote: "A religion to be true must include everything from the amoeba to the milky way." Nothing must be excluded from our view and purview for any faith to be true. 
— Stephen Kendrick, Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes
I am not protecting myself or preaching you my story, Reasons will be many but life will move on even in painful journey.
— Santosh Kalwar
Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people; before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children; before you preach to me of your passion for your faith, teach me about it through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I’m not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as I am in how you choose to live and give.
— Cory Booker
Theologians and other clerks, You won't understand this book, -- However bright your wits -- If you do not meet it humbly, And in this way, Love and Faith Make you surmount Reason, for They are the protectors of Reason's house. 
— Marguerite Porete
It is the business of a virtuous clergy to censure vice in every appearance of it.
— Patrick Henry
She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new unhappiness.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden