Quotes About Religion

If I replace the word God with the word nature, I am far more at ease with the whole religious enterprise.

None of us, I think, in the mid-'70s … would have thought we'd be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed. — Ian McEwan

In m second year I attended a public debate on a theme that interested me, though not by its novelty: does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones? In those days that theme was supposed to be religious as well as scientific, so the principle speakers swerved from fanatical solemnity to facetious jocularity, and changed the ground of their argument whenever it gave them the slightest advantage over their opponents.

If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who says there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University, page 214)

A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene….No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus.

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the opium of the masses—cannot hear the music of the spheres.

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

The religion of the future will be cosmic religion. It will transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology.

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

If I were not a Jew I would be a Quaker.

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

I cannot conceive of a great scientist without this profound faith: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.

The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.

Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Evil is the absence of God.

primitive religions are based entirely on fear

For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him.