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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.

Random quote on Religion

Most quoted on religion:

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Voltaire

One religion is as true as another.

Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

[N]o man's religion ever survives his morals.

Robert South Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions (1727)

Religion is the great balm of existence because it takes us outside ourselves, connects us to something larger.

Robert Greene The Art of Seduction (2001)

[E]xtreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery.

Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle (1948)

The chain that's fixed to the throne of Jove,
On which the fabric of our world depends,
One link dissolved, the whole creation ends.

Edmund Waller

You own a watch the invention of the mind,
Though for a single motion 'tis designed,
As well as that which is with greater thought
With various springs, for various motions wrought.

Richard Blackmore

The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Heaven to me's a fair blue stretch of sky,
Earth's jest a dusty road.

John Masefield

No more fatigue, no more distress,
Nor sin nor death shall reach the place;
No groans shall mingle with the songs
That warble from immortal tongues.

Philip Doddridge

Hell is no other but a soundlesse pit,
Where no one beame of comfort peeps in it.

Robert Herrick

When sin turned into guilt, something was lost.

Jürgen Habermas

Sin is an evil of a kind that could not exist except through the denial of grace. It is not in any sense a violation of a law: it is always a personal offense against a person. It is unfaithfulness.

Ivan Illich

How shall I lose the sin yet keep the sense,
And love th' offender, yet detest the offence?

Alexander Pope Eloise to Abelard (1717)

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall;
Some run from breaks of ice, and answer none:
And some condemned for a fault alone.

William Shakespeare Measure for Measure (1603)

As for our own faults, it would take a large slate to hold the account of them; but, thank God, we know where to take them, and how to get the better of them.

Charles Spurgeon

And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,
Was beat with fist instead of a stick.

Samuel Butler

He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand, and virtue go.

William Shakespeare Measure for Measure (1603)

It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.

William Shakespeare

One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go any where, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.

Ulysses S. Grant

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