Quotes About Religion

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

— Thomas Henry Huxley

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the source of all true art and science.

— Albert Einstein

Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.

— H. G. Wells

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.

— Havelock Ellis

Religion is the opiate of the masses.

— Karl Marx

 [The yarmulke] is an indication that one recognizes that there is something above you.  It says, “Above my intellect is a sign of godliness.”

— Rabbi Pinchas Stopler

I could prove God statistically.

— George Gallup

The task of organized religion is not to prove that God was the in the first century, but that he is in the twentieth.

— S. H. Miller

To be religious is to have a life that flows with the presence of the extraordinary.

— Ann Belford Ulanov

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies for love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

— Alice Walker

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

— Reinhold Niebuhr (later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous)

The value of persistent prayer is not that he will hear us...but that we will finally hear him.

— William McGill

Until you know that life is interesting— and find it so — you haven’t found your soul.

— Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher

God, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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 minds.

— Albert Einstein

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say; sanctity is the state about which theology has nothing to say.

— W. H. Auden

It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.

— Frederick Buechner

You can’t divorce religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace, and your soul in the joy of Christ.

— Thomas Merton

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

— Edmund Burke

I find that the nicest and best people generally profess no religion at all, but are ready to like the best men of all religions.

— Samuel Butler

I am one of those cliff-hanging Catholics.  I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.

— Martin Sheen

Mothers and dads that take their children to church never get into trouble.

— J. Edgar Hoover

A pretty good test of a man’s religion is how it affects his pocketbook.

— Francis James Grimke

Every age thinks it is perfect, especially in religion.

— William Pickens

Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.

— Leroy (Satchel) Paige

While there is almost no religion operating in race relations, there is plenty of God.

— Jay Saunders Redding

The government of the United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion. The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan nation.

— Treaty with Tripoli

If God’s got anything better than sex to offer, he’s certainly keeping it to himself.

— Sting

The great god Ra, whose shrine once covered acres, is filler now for crossword puzzle makers.

—Keith Preston

Who says I am not under the special protection of God?

— Adolf Hitler

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.

— Kingsley Amis

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

— Graham Greene

I’m a Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.

— Jack Kerouac

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

— George Bernard Shaw

Religions die when they are proved to be true.  Science is the record of dead religions.

— Oscar Wilde

Christ died for our sins.  Are we to make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

— Jules Feiffer

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.

— Isaiah 52:7

The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

— Isaiah 35:1

What hath God wrought!

— Numbers 23:23

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets.  I do not mean his maker, but himself.

— Dean William R. Inge

No one can say that Christianity has failed.  It has never been tried.

— Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Giving away a fortune is taking Christianity too far.

— Charlotte Bingham

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believed in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

— John 3:16

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

— Luke 23:34

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.

— Herb Caen

Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.

— D. T. Niles

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church toward woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment; her own conscience, her own will.

— Matilda Gage

Being an Episcopalian interferes neither with my business nor my religion.

— John Kendrick Bangs

Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

— H. L. Mencken