Quotes About Religion

No one will presumably ever be able to prove or disprove such fundamental religious principles as the existence of God.

Historically, religion has often proved a more lethal and more divisive force than any secular ideology. It has also often been a more divisive force than race.

I am not particularly religious. But I think we do face the question of where God is, why we are created and where does life go, why we exist. That sort of thing. And it is very hard to talk about it these days, because it cannot be proven. It is hard to discuss it rationally.

If the gods do a shameful thing, they are not gods.

Verily we must believe the Gods are senseless, if we feel well disposed to murderers.

Love was central to Victorians' sense of self because through it they learned to know not only their partners but themselves. Love was a template for authentic, albeit restrained, expression of their inner self, but it was also a means to attain spiritual perfection, as was made clear by the consistent association of the romantic discourse with the values and metaphors of religion.

Cordelia: I hope I've got a vocation. Charles: I don't know what that means. Cordelia: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They're all sodomites with unpleasant accents. --Cousin Jasper

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. . . .

Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.

I've usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest.

It's not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It's all part of the poetry, the Alice-In-Wonderland side of religion.

Do you know last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I'd decided to have it brought up a Catholic? I hadn't thought about religion before; I haven't since; but just at that time, when I was was waiting for the birth, I thought, 'That's the one thing I can give her. It doesn't seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.' It was odd, wanting to give something one had lost oneself

he was not a man of religious habit, but he knew more than most Catholics about their Church;

But how do you know He *doesn't* want us to have it—the cross, I mean? I bet He's just waiting for one of us to go and find it—just at this moment when it's most needed. Just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there's a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against. I'm going off to find it

If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her.

D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense." "It's odd you should say that. I've heard it before from other people. It's one of the many reasons why I don't think I should make a good priest.

Brideshead Revisited

Could anything be more improbable than that a religion following a man born of an unwed mother among a widely despised people in an out-of-the-way part of the world—a man then crucified by the ruling authorities on a charge of treason—should become the official religion of the Roman world, the formative influence on Western civilization, and a significant influence in other parts of the world?

It] has been said that the difference between Greek and Israelite religion was that the Greeks worshiped the 'holiness of beauty' whereas the Jews worshiped 'the beauty of holiness.

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.

Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?