Quotes About Religion

One hundred years before the present government existed, a powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated his views in clear, unflinching terms. I thank God, he said, that there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them...God save us from both!

It's the side-by-side culture of the Talmud I like so much. 'On the one hand' and 'on the other hand' is frustrating for people seeking absolute faith, but for me it gives religion an ambidextrous quality that suits my temperament.

So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

If god exists, he is not to be believed in.

Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

Parents don't have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and Parenthood so utterly beautiful: the All or nothing wager. The Faith.

What if it was man and not God that did all of this? I do not believe in man, either.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to often come. Unforgiving, unrelenting, bringing darkness upon darkness, the end of the world is something we have become well acquainted with, habitualized, made into a ritual. It is our religion to try to forget it in its absence, make peace with it when it is undeniable, and return its embrace when it finally comes for us, as it always does.

Human beings are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.

The Upright congregants looked down on the Slouchers, who seemed willing to sacrifice any Jewish law for the sake of what they feebly termed the great and necessary reconciliation of religion with life. The Uprighters called them names and promised them an eternity of agony in the next world for their eagerness to be comfortable in this one.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love each other.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man incapable of holding any public station; for

the quarrel is not against any particular points of hard digestion in the Christian system, but against religion in general; which, by laying restraints on human nature, is supposed the great enemy to the freedom of thought and action. Upon

And here, though it makes an odd sound, yet it is necessary to say, that whoever professes himself a member of the Church of England, ought to believe a God and his providence, together with revealed religion, and the divinity of Christ. For

I used to be a Christian, but I decided to follow the teachings of Jesus instead.

La tensión de algo que se veía venir, algo irracional porque venía untado de violencia, imbécil porque tenía su origen en la política, cruel porque en ello había metido la mano la religión.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.