John Templeton Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

Let's worship Divinity, but understand the divinity we worship is beyond our comprehension.

John Templeton
We may find the Divine to be 3,000 times what we think it is now. It's like asking the tulip there to explain you. The tulip is a beautiful creation, with millions of atoms cooperating with each other to produce great beauty, but ask that tulip to talk about you, and it can't do it. It doesn't have those perceptive abilities. Wouldn't it be conceited to suggest that I had the abilities to describe the deity?

John Templeton
I served for 42 years on the board of trustees of the largest Presbyterian seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and we had brilliant people — teachers and students both — but they did not come up with many new concepts. They weren't invited to come up with new concepts. Anybody who had come up with a new concept would have been under suspicion for being out of step with the tradition or out of step with the teachings of the church.

John Templeton
Faith does not imply a closed, but an open mind. Quite the opposite of blindness, faith appreciates the vast spiritual realities that materialists overlook by getting trapped in the purely physical.

John Templeton
We hope that there will be nothing that conflicts with anybody's religion or faith. We would never say a person's religion is not effective. We say, "Would you be interested in something more effective?" We always put things in an optimistic, progressive perspective. Do you want to make your prayers more effective? Not that they are not effective, but do you want to help them become more effective?

John Templeton
The objective of our religious foundations is to teach people that they are hurting themselves when they say they believe something. What we should realize is we know almost nothing about God and therefore we should be eager to search and to learn.

John Templeton