religion

"You don't know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it: I shall never undertake it. I don't blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself. I never did harm any man since I was born in the world. My voice is always for peace."

"It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause"

"There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows."

"Your way of life is sinful and wrong,"he said fiercely.Thus says a man who admits to worshipping a God who vilifies pleasure, relegates women to roles that are little more than servants and broodmares, though they are the backbone of your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear."

"I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit."

"To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid."

"I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly."

"Don’t tell me about your god with your words. Show me about your god with your actions."

"Everything in this life passes away — only God remains, only He is worth struggling towards. We have a choice: to follow the way of this world, of the society that surrounds us, and thereby find ourselves outside of God; or to choose the way of life, to choose God Who calls us and for Whom our heart is searching."

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."

"He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion."

"But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes."

"I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand."

"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion."

"Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy."

"Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand."

"I feel that we should stop wasting our time trying to please the supernatural and concentrate on improving the welfare of human beings. I think that, uh, we should use our energy and our initiative to solve our problems, and stop relying on prayer and wishful thinking. If we have faith in ourselves, we won't have to have faith in gods."

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!"

"People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to."

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."