Quotes About Religion

The movement toward choosing religion, rampant as it is, shouldn't be surprising. Ours is an era marked by the desire to define - or redefine - ourselves.

I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.

To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, religion was mankind's first and therefore worst tool for understanding the world. Yet for all that

A great boob he is to pit himself against a holy Father and a bishop of the Church, with the very House of God next door. The nerve of him!

Tal vez exista, a pesar de todo, una solución autentica, la única solución. Incluso en los periodos de catástrofes, incluso en los períodos de las religiones políticas, hay una actividad del hombre tal vez más importante que la política: la búsqueda de la Verdad

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God.

The chapels are for people to meet, and to talk to each other or sing together. Around them, as you know, moves almost the whole life of the village. That, really, is their religion.

The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)

Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.

Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, "I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it was legal in California. The old patriarchal default settings did not apply in their relationships, and it was a glorious thing to witness.

Our Lady of Cheribim Chit-Chat.

Heresy no longer existed within religion; it was founded in the state.

Für mich ist klar: Alle bekannten, diesseitigen Götter sind menschengemacht. Für das Jenseitige haben wir weder Namen noch die Kraft der Vorstellung. Ich bleibe also Possibilist, schließe das Göttliche in meinem Weltbild weder aus noch ein. Die alten Götter aber brauche ich nicht; auch fehlen sie mir nicht.

ACCORDING TO THE Latin root of the word, 'religion' would mean 'to bind again'. Now how does the concept of binding or tying up come to be applied as the common term for all our various teachings? The common enemy of all religious disciplines, the target of all moral precepts laid down by the great teachers of mankind, is selfishness of mind. For it is just this which causes ignorance, anger and passion which are at the root of all the troubles of the world.

MAY 1 THE VERY PURPOSE of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others. Rather, we must criticize ourselves. How much am I doing about my anger? About my attachment, about my hatred, about my pride, my jealousy? These are the things which we must check in daily life.

WHETHER ONE BELIEVES in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.

As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language, frozen forever in time

The separation of "church and state" of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community.