The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.

Thomas Jefferson

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

Edgar Allan Poe

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Aldous Huxley

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Seneca

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Alfred North Whitehead

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

Alfred North Whitehead

The Christian religion, then, is not an affair of preaching, or prating, or ranting, but of taking care of the bodies as well as the souls of people; not an affair of belief and of faith and of professions, but an affair of doing good, and especially to those who are in want; not an affair of fire and brimstone, but an affair of bacon and read, beer and a bed.

William Cobbett

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Matthew Arnold

The only time anyone's admitted they were a Christian before was when they were busy telling me why they're better than me.

Randy K. Milholland

Never confuse the faith with the supposedly faithful.

Randy K. Milholland

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

Henri Bergson

Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.

Wendell Phillips

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.

John Adams

Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.

Gore Vidal

Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.

James Madison

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness ... the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

The Dalai Lama

It can not be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!

Patrick Henry

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

Eric Hoffer

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Sigmund Freud

Eve was not taken out of Adam's head to top him, neither out of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be loved by him.

Matthew Henry

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Albert Einstein

If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.

Albert Einstein

I was in my thirteenth year when I heard a voice from God to help me govern my conduct. And the first time I was very much afraid.

Joan of Arc

One religion is as true as another.

Robert Burton

Why are you scared to dream of god when it's salvation that you want?

Conor Oberst

There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion.

Henry David Thoreau

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction.

Ian McKellen

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Bertrand Russell

In the relationship between man and religion, the state is firmly committed to a position of neutrality.

Tom C. Clark

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

Henry Louis Mencken

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

Ulysses S. Grant

There is a place in God's sun for the youth 'farthest down' who has the vision, the determination, and the courage to reach it.

Mary Mcleod Bethune

All religions die of one disease - that of being found out.

John Morley

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

Dave Barry

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

Charles Lamb

Angels dancing on the head of a pin dissolve into nothingness at the bedside of a dying child.

Waiter Rant

I draw most of my religious beliefs from Star Wars.

Mike Dirnt

Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.

Robert H. Jackson

When we think of life's complexities, it's pressures and it's disarray, we find that the best investment is to take the time to pray!

Gillis Triplett

Religion is the highest vanity.

Hebbel

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

James Feibleman

Religion is more like response to a friend than it is like obedience to an expert.

Austin Farrer

Moral: A peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deuteronomy 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord.

Donald Morgan

How enlightened is wearing God like some do Versace?

Vanna Bonta

If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.

Voltaire

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

Carl Sandburg

A religion without its mysteries is a temple without a God.

Robert Hall

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

H. L. Mencken

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.

Karl Barth

Language is clumsy, understanding is subjective, religion is obstructive. We must rise above these obstacles to achieve complete being.

Kate Miller

Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Stephen King

The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est- this is the supreme practical maxim, this the turning point of the world's History.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

Jane Austen

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he ''lives'' his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.

George Gurdjieff

Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.

Robert H. Schuller

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two - slavery here and hell hereafter.

Robert Green Ingersoll

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

George Santayana

Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth.

Herman Wouk

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.

Paul Tillich

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

Larry Flynt

The Bar Room has a corner table placed strategically at a point diagonally across from the entrance. the table of tables in the setting of settings in the building of buildings. In the religion of lunch, this is the holy of holies.

Raymond Sokolov

People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.

Irving Kristol

On the Catholic priesthood: I refuse to consider anything said to me about saving my soul by any man who spends all his time with one hand on the Bible and his other hand thrust down the pants of an adolescent child. I don't want to hear it.

Anthony Beal

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg

Whatever God's dream about man may be, it seems certain it cannot come true unless man cooperates.

Stella Terrill Mann

Believing in god is akin to being in love. No one can tell you, you just have know through and through balls to bones.

Kyle Chapman

It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.

Pope John Xxiii

The silent, lethal creep of apostasy began uneventfully. His quest for holiness had morphed into a mere pursuit of happiness. He never discerned it, nor would anyone else. He was a materialist now - just one of the well-respected selectmen who quelled controversy at the expense of progress.....

Steve Wallace

The task of organized religion is not to prove that God was in the 1st century, but that he is in the 20th.

S. H. Miller

When you can get people to believe in virgin birth and resurrection of the dead as reality - well, what can one say.

Grace Mcgarvie

America must raise an empire of permanent duration, supported upon the grand pillars of Truth, Freedom, and Religion, encouraged by the smiles of Justice and defended by her own patriotic sons.

Nathanael Greene

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

Anthony Burgess

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

D. H. Lawrence

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Frederick Buechner

God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion reveals itself in struggling to reveal the meaning of the world.

S. H. Miller

[The] council not only sanctioned reform, it accelerated it. What this meant was that Catholics tried to solve the riddle of religion and modernity overnight.

Jay P. Dolan

The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establis.

Joseph Story

The crisis in black America is threefold...economic...political...and spiritual.

Cornel West

The Old Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws.

John Macy

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

Frederick The Great

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Lucretius

When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop window, you may depend upon it, he keeps a very small stock of it within.

Charles H. Spurgeon

No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state.

Felix Adler

Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

John Fowles

God is living in the circle of eternity, and we the [straight] line cut from the world must be hammered, bent and broken, to be re-forged into His circle.

Robert J. Mccracken

It is an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of "crutch" for those who can't stand the reality of God.

Tom Stoppard

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

Saint Ignatius Of Loyola

I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power.

Catullus

You will never cease to be the most amazed person on earth at what God has done for you on the inside.

Oswald Chambers

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

Robert Green Ingersoll

A cult is a religion with no political power.

Tom Wolfe

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobb.

Peter B. Medawar

My mom grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx and gave me an invaluable piece of advice for dealing with people in New York - if someone’s bugging you just act crazy. I’ve modified her approach somewhat. Public displays of religiosity work just as well as feigning psychosis.

Waiter Rant

The Roman Church has never erred, and, according to the scripture, never shall err.

Pope Gregory Vii

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Ambrose Bierce

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

Abraham Lincoln

Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.i.e. When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion.

Anthony Storr

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

David Hume

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Orson Welles

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

Mark Twain

Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.

George Gaylord Simpson

When they circumcised him they threw away the wrong bit.

David Lloyd George

It's not listed in the Bible, but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk-show host.

Jim Bakker

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

Madalyn Murray O'hair

What has God revealed to man that has ever helped him get a living?

Lemuel K. Washburn

Frank: All the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism. Arthur: Christianity, of course, but why journalism?

Frank Harris

One is Christianized to the extent that he is a Christianizer. One is evangelized to the extent that he is an evangelist.

L.j. Suenens

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

Lenny Bruce

One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.

Anna Julia Cooper

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

Jane Austen

The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve its purity.

Matthew Henry

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

Tom Robbins

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

John C. Danforth

In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said 70 times 7. Well, I want you all to know that I'm keeping a chart.

Hillary Clinton

I'm not really religious but very spiritual. I give money to this company that manufactures hearing aids on a regular basis. More people should really hear me sing. I have a gift from God.

Christina Aguilera

Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache.

Hungarian Proverb

That they (the powers of heaven) may be conferred upon us, it is true; but when we undertake to cover• our sins, or to gratify our pride, our vain ambition, or to exercise control or dominion• or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw• themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved.

Dr. Joseph Smith

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

David Hume

He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers.

Zoroaster

No matter how much I probe and prodI cannot quite believe in God,But, oh, I hope to God that HeUnswervingly believes in me.

E. Y. Harburg

Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

Ernest Renan

It is easy to become a monk in one's old age.

Ethiopian Proverb

Atheism, the same than religion, can be cause of conviction or gregarism.

Ezequiel D'leon Masis

I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

George Bernard Shaw

Religion is a defense against the experience of God.

Carl Jung

There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity is called the religion of pity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Oscar Wilde

Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Oscar Wilde

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

Oscar Wilde

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.

Oscar Wilde

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Benjamin Disraeli

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I am for freedom of religion, & against all maneuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.

Thomas Jefferson

Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do; nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.

John Lennon

The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.

George Washington

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

George Washington

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

Carl Sagan

There's an empty spot I've always had inside me. I tried to fill it with family, religion, community service, but those were dead ends! I think this chair is the answer.

Matt Groening

What if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.

Matt Groening

I think that it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.

Stephen Hawking

And, sir, when we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God?

William Wilberforce

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Douglas Adams

There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

Woodrow Wilson

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, But depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.

Sir Francis Bacon

Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.

Samuel Butler

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Charlotte Bronte

When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!

David Starr Jordan

We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.… Our Constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

Some people are that - more than a parent, more than a role model, more than anything less than a religion.

Margaret Cho

Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty but it is religion and morality alone that can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.

John Adams

The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.

John Adams

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

The Dalai Lama

Music is my religion.

Jimi Hendrix

I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness….

The Dalai Lama

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

The Dalai Lama

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

C. S. Lewis

We have enough religion to hate each other, but not enough to love each other.

Jonathan Swift

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place -- service -- social service -- the ants creed, the bees creed.

John Galsworthy

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Baruch Spinoza

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Blaise Pascal

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another.

Jonathan Swift

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

Howard Nemerov

Religion I have disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give to them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had that and I had not given them one cent, they would be rich. If they have not that, and I had given them the world, they would be poor.

Patrick Henry

Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

Sigmund Freud

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

Eric Hoffer

The fundamentalists are increasing. People, afraid to oppose those fundamentalists, shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion, which is the source of fundamentalism.

Taslima Nasrin

Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion, history, art, and romance would be useless.

Honore De Balzac

Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.

Patrick Buchanan

We do not destroy religion by destroying superstition.

Cicero

Your daily life is your temple and your religion. When you enter into it take with you your all.

Kahlil Gibran

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore De Balzac

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.

Malcolm Muggeridge

God and religion have nothing to do with this war.

Reg Keys

The European newspapers have abused our religion. We are expressing our anger. Usually protesters are peaceful but some miscreants do bad things and other people join them.

Shaukat Khan

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Arthur C. Clarke

Judaism is a non-proselytizing religion, but we realize there are many people who know little about Judaism and are curious to know more. We aren't looking to win people to our point of view, but we just want to be better understood.

Rabbi Geoff Dennis

Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.

C. Northcote Parkinson

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Annie Dillard

Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.

Andre Malraux

I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.

Taslima Nasrin

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. (attributed).

Theodore Dreiser

The difference between a saint and a hypocrite is that one lies for his religion, the other by it.

Minna Antrim

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

Alexis De Tocqueville

God is not a specific religion. God is God. We choose different ways to meet together, worship him, follow him.

Scott Hubbard

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

William Ralph Inge

The Dover disclaimer brings religion straight into the science classroom.

Alan Leshner

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Herman Hesse

I take my religion seriously.

Dolle Haven

It evolved into a 'religion' much like Christianity started with the teaching of the originator and gradually things were added to the liturgy, like Christmas. Buddhism gives you the philosophy, and then the culture adds to it because we like rituals and holidays. Those things address the social aspects of communities.

Stephen Asma

In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

Lucy Stone

When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion.

Voltaire