Religious quotes
7.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort."
"Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance."
"The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error."
"Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning."
"Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness."
"What I want to know, though, is why all of a sudden is everybody acting like gangs are some new phenomenon in this country? Almost everyone in America is affiliated with some kind of gang. We got the FBI, the ATF, the police departments, the religious groups, the Democrats and the Republicans. Everybody's got their own little clique and they're all out there gangbanging in their own little way."
"An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtly but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a 'scoffer'."
"The greatness of prayer is nothing but an extension of the greatness and glory of God in our lives To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule - it is a failure to treat God as God. It is a sin against his glory"
"Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it."
"While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy."
"The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels."
"My friends are so cynical, they refuse to keep the faith."
"She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover."
"Now, with God's help, I shall become myself."
"When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool"
"I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water."
"The word of God is definitely above culture, in terms of what or who should have authority in our lives. However, we must remember that we are within culture, and our calling in Christ is to play our part in the redemption and transformation of individuals and cultures. I believe the recent history of the religious subculture teaches all too clearly that unless we are moving forward in seeking the genuine transformation of culture, then we are standing still and it is transforming us."
"A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce."
"When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life."
"I think they probably got it on, Jesus and Mary Magdalene."
