#religion

"Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them."

"Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse."

"Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life."

"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."

"Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing."

"To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all."

"All teachings are mere references. The true experience is living your own life. Then, even the holiest of words are only words."

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."

"In order to know who you are you need to know God is."

"salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb."

"لما رأى المتيقظون سطوة الدنيا بأهلها, وخداع الأمل لأربابه, وتملك الشيطان قياد النفوس, ورأوا الدولة للنفس الأمارة؛ لجأوا إلى حصن التضرع والالتجاء؛ كما يأوي العبد المذعور إلى حرم سيده"

"God not only loves the obedient - He enlightens them."

"The Way is not in the sky; the Way is in the heart."

"There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades."

"Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies."

"There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it."

"The healing is my working out my salvation. The need constant because my desire for seperateness constantly wrestles with my need for oneness with Jesus. The search for Jesus is bigger, deeper and agonizing."

"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?"

"Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart."

"The gods too are fond of a joke."