"Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue."
Read quote
21 likes
Atheist quotes
Atheist
1.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Atheist
Browse quotes that often appear alongside atheist — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Atheist quotes (page 11 of 93)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies."
Read quote
20 likes
"I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously."
Read quote
20 likes
"To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away."
Read quote
20 likes
"Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things because to demystify supposedly 'holy text dictated by god' and show that they are man made and what you have to show [is] there internal inconsistencies and absurdities. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority... it is an indispensable thing people can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that they have to assume there is something to be blasphemed - some divine work, well I don't accept the premise."
Read quote
20 likes
"There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest."
Read quote
20 likes
"I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood."
Read quote
20 likes
"Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay."
Read quote
20 likes
"From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm."
Read quote
19 likes
"What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos."
Read quote
19 likes
"I don't believe in God. My God is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life."
Read quote
19 likes
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
Read quote
19 likes
"Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms."
Read quote
19 likes
"For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything."
Read quote
19 likes
"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage."
Read quote
19 likes
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
Read quote
19 likes
"Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief."
Read quote
18 likes
"Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable."
Read quote
18 likes
"Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science."
Read quote
18 likes
"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."
Read quote
18 likes