Religion Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Karl Marx

Matthew Arnold

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Sri Aurobindo

Honoré de Balzac

Peter Benenson

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…It is the opium of the people.

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.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?

Harriet Martineau

The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.

John Henrik Clarke

What appears spectral today will be natural tomorrow. Where are such signs and works? How do we recognize the genuine ones? Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times... The present isolation of the rare, genuine artist is absolutely unavoidable for the moment... This fact leads us to the idea that we are standing today at the turning point of two long epochs, similar to the state of the world fifteen hundred years ago, when there was also a transitional period without art and religion - a period in which great and traditional ideas died and new and unexpected ones took their place.

When people discuss religion, it is a pity that they often become excited and argue. We should merely listen, as one does on a dark night; we should merely gaze at the stars.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

Christopher Hitchens

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

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

Arthur C. Clarke

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

James A. Michener

Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

The ecclesiastical establishments of Europe, which serve to support tyrannical governments, are not the Christian religion, but abuses and corruptions of it. The religion of Christ and his apostles, in it primitive simplicity and purity, unencumbered with the trappings of power and the pomp of ceremonies, is the surest basis of a republican government.

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

That which we call the Hindu religion is really the Eternal religion because it embraces all others.

Religion united its influence with those of loyalty and love, and the order of knighthood, endowed with all the sanctity and religious awe that attended the priesthood, became an object of ambition to the greatest sovereigns.

Thomas Bulfinch

Religion! what treasure untold
Resides in that heavenly word!

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Joseph Campbell

Lukewarmness I account a sin
As great in love as in religion.

Well! some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.

Maria Edgeworth

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

Rapine, avarice, expense
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.

William Wordsworth