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Religion Quotes

Religion is a page where believers and unbelievers share space. Shakespeare and Milton lead, but Robert Ingersoll and the biologist Jerry Coyne are close behind, and the sourced favourites lean sceptical: Bertrand Russell in Sceptical Essays (1928) on moralists and Hell, Bierce in 1911 calling religion a daughter of Hope and Fear.

Three entries are flagged. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep” is credited to the missionary Jim Elliot, and the notes call it a paraphrase of the English clergyman Philip Henry (1631–1696). Newton’s remark that he could calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of the people is disputed, and it is usually tied to the South Sea stock bubble. A line about Earth and Heaven credited to David Hare is flagged misattributed.

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Most quoted on religion:

Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

Alfonso X of Castile

The most obvious failure of organized religions is surely that almost all of them have made a mockery of what their founders taught.

Walter Kaufmann The Faith of a Heretic (1961)

The hard facts are extraordinary, without adding superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

Vernor Vinge A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

I am a man,
More sinn'd against than sinning.

William Shakespeare King Lear (1605)

Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.

Alice Meynell

The 'I', the 'self' of the child of God, is born in the midst of the ruins of repented idolatry.

James Alison Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)

I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara (1905)

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

Charles Caleb Colton Lacon (1820)

The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself.

Henry Ward Beecher Life Thoughts (1858)

There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practise it while they hear.

Henry Ward Beecher Life Thoughts (1858)

Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.

Lin Yutang The Importance of Living (1937)

Now, as to the persistence of superstition, only an impoverished mind considers itself the repository of absolute knowledge.

Jack Vance Future Tense (1964)

The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

Robert A. Heinlein Revolt in 2100 (1953)

Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.

Martin Luther

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Martin Luther Ninety-five Theses (1517)

The object of preaching is, constantly to remind mankind of what mankind are constantly forgetting; not to supply the defects of human intelligence, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.

Sydney Smith

The principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause of judgment, is idolatry.

Tertullian

And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life.

William Ernest Hocking The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912)

As the greatest things often take their rise from the smallest beginnings, so the worst things sometimes proceed from good intentions.

Joseph Priestley An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782)

It is easy to see how superstition, with its false glosses, mocks God, while it tries to please him.

John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536)

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