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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:

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.

Philip Sheridan

Hell is a city much like London —
A populous and smoky city.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Peter Bell the Third (1819)

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

William James The Principles of Psychology (1890)

If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.

Theodore Dreiser The Genius (1915)

Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end.

Nelson Mandela

Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.

Willard van Orman Quine

The GOP is poised to nominate a candidate whose life could be used to illustrate the deceitfully seductive quality of sin summarized in the phrase "the glamour of evil."

Alan Keyes

Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence.

John Tyndall Fragments of Science, Vol. II (1879)

It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over.

Dorothy Day

Nothing is a greater stranger to my breast, or a sin that my soul more abhors, than that black and detestable one, ingratitude.

George Washington

The Christian belief in heaven originated after the death of Jesus with the idea that he had been taken up into heaven or exalted to the right hand of God.

Albert Nolan Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976)

We need a new England where all religions and colours feel proud of our flag and recognise how important our identity and culture is.

Tommy Robinson

God gave His laws to Moses… and like it or not, God condemns the sin of homosexuality.

Jack T. Chick Doom Town (1991)

Religion is not a native category. It is not a first-person term of self-characterization. It is a category imposed from the outside on some aspect of native culture.

Jonathan Z. Smith Relating Religion (2004)

Hundreds of wise men cannot make the world a heaven, but one idiot is enough to turn it into a hell.

Raheel Farooq Kalam (2018)

One might even call him dreamy. It was a match made in heaven. Or it could’ve been, until he ghosted me.

Jacob Tobia

Islam does not distinguish between the religious and profane. There being no ecclesia, its counterpart the saeculum becomes redundant. In a sense Islam is a secular religion, because it has no church.

Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi

Sin is the key to misery.

Makhdoom Sharfuddin Ahmed Yahya Maneri The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

Satan
the envious
said with a sigh:
Christians
know more
about their hell
than I.

Alfred Kreymborg The Little World: 1914 and After (1932)

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