Quotes About Religion

How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.

he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to churches.

How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.

Fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War—Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then, is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force. 25

Ego non baptiso te in nomine...but make out the rest yourself.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

Marjorie, your lack of self-knowledge is fabulous. Being a Jew is your whole life. Good Lord, you don't eat bacon. I've seen you shove it off your plate as though it were a dead mouse." "Well, I can't help that, it's habit." Noel shook

In Judaism praying for benefits is a very small part of the liturgy. Most of it is commitment of one's fortunes to God, and meditation on sacred writings which put in clear words the few great points of our religion. Its daily aim is a renewal of religious energy through an act which declares one's Jewish identity and one's hope in the Lord.

The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: 'Don't kill; don't be vile; don't steal; don't tell lies about others; don't envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.' This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of Thou Shalt Nots is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing.

Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and fearful. It would be just as silly to assert that disbelief in God is a crutch for the immoral and the ill-read.

don't make the mistake of skipping the Old Testament. It's the core of all religion, I

And my revulsion wasn't against your religion, but all religions. They're all more or less alike. You can't blame the human race for preferring some bright storyteller's dream or other to the black cold meaningless dark of the real universe.

religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

the DeMille films were foolishness. I was born to do this, and I can do it precisely because I thought the whole religion through when I broke away. It takes someone who knows—not believes—to capture and picture the storytelling truth about Moishe Rabenu in a film.

food disciplines are part of every great religion. Psychologically they're almost inevitable, and extremely practical....Religious discipline is nothing but a permanent psychic shelter.

Christian Europe should be by nature one; but it has forgotten its nature in forgetting its religion.

Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.

A man going uphill may be at the same level as another man going down hill; but they are facing different ways and have different destinies. Our world, passing out of the old Paganism of Greece and Rome towards the consummation of Christendom and a Catholic civilization from which we all derive, is the very negation of the same world leaving the light of its ancestral religion and sliding back into the dark.

In the Seventeenth Century a man feared to go to Mass lest the Judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favor of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.

At the same time, Europe's long-dead postal service was resumed. Now Erasmus could become a snail-mail junkie, using a stream of letters24 to unite a community of international eccentrics into a movement which downgraded religion's death ride to heaven and exalted earthly humanity. The moment was appropriate. For the first time since the rise of multicellularity, there was no longer just one global brain but two—one microbial, the other that of man- and womankind.

party politics and religion now substituting for class conflict.