Skip to content

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:

Religion, if in heavenly truths attired,
Needs only to be seen to be admired.

William Cowper

Religion does not censure or exclude
Unnumbered pleasures, harmlessly pursued.

William Cowper

To judge religion we must have it—not stare at it from the bottom of a seeming interminable ladder

George MacDonald

If I could pray with my cock I'd be a lot more religious.

George R. R. Martin

For virtue's self may too much zeal be had;
The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

Alexander Pope

But now I think the belief in a Divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements, and perfects it.

John Campbell Shairp Culture and Religion (1870)

All persecution and oppression of weak consciences on the score of religious persuasions, are highly unjustifiable upon every principle of natural reason, civil liberty, or sound religion.

William Blackstone

After a long time the great and awful Name was forgotten and the people, men, women and children, only recognized an image of wood or stone and the temple of wood or stone which they had been brought up from infancy to serve by bowing down.

Maimonides Mishneh Torah (1180)

For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without invoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all.

Wernher von Braun

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.

Sigmund Freud New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933)

Weave the warp, and weave the woof,
The winding sheet of Edward's race.
Give ample room and verge enough,
The Characters of hell to trace.

Thomas Gray The Bard (1757)

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.

Herbert Spencer The Development Hypothesis (1852)

There is, I believe, something, which may be named by the misleading and debased word 'religion', and is the most distinctively human or awakened activity of man. But clearly there is something else, which is also called 'religion', and is his greatest folly and shame.

Olaf Stapledon

Misery follows sin; sin itself is misery; and the soul that sinneth dies of course, without any means taken to put that soul to death; though Divine interference would be indispensable to prevent the consequences following the cause.

Caroline Fry

(The drop excavates the stone, not with force but by falling often.)

Ovid

I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit.
I have not been Happy.

Jorge Luis Borges

Small sins are sometimes harder to confess than big ones... but that's why it's important to confess them.

G. K. Chesterton

Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.

Isaiah

You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.

Rufus Choate

I would have every minister of the gospel address his audience with the zeal of a friend, with the generous energy of a father, and with the exuberant affection of a mother.

François Fénelon

Related topics