Quotes and aphorisms on religion, great words of wisdom and different opinions by various authors on the most important social phenomenon of the world culture.
A nation that displays the shitty faces of poor religious idiots on the walls of its cities must by strict logic necessarily be destroyed, never mind the international law of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.
Louis Aragon
In the past, to subjugate the people, the powerful used force, laws and religion; now, they also have football and television.
Carl William Brown
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
Matthew Arnold
There is a world of practical religion in simply being considerate of others.
Roger Babson
It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
Francis Bacon
The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin
Religion: a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
My poor are my best patients. God pays for them.
Herman Boerhaave
I coined a synonym for syncretism, namely syncretinism.
Carl William Brown
Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.
Phillips Brooks
And lips say “God be pitiful,” who never said, “God be praised.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.
Patrick Buchanan
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.
Edmund Burke
One gives praise to God not only through prayers of thanksgiving, but also through obedience to His commandments and service to others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves.
George H. Bush )
I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day…
Lord Byron
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If religion is only human, and its form is man’s form, it follows that everything in religion is true.
Emile Auguste Chartier
Nowadays, besides being corrupted by stupidity, the Vatican is corrupted by syncretinism.
Carl William Brown
Religion! What treasure untold resides in that heavenly word!
William Cowper
Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.
Benjamin Disraeli
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Serving God is doing good to man. But praying is thought an easier service and is therefore more generally chosen.
Benjamin Franklin
The Pope is none other than the president of that huge Vatican industry that has made the Catholic religion its great consumer product.
Carl William Brown
Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye
Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye
Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place – social service – the ants creed, the bees creed.
John Galsworthy
All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former — of the corruption of the will.
Alexander Herzen
It’s incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.
Edward Hoagland
For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.
Thomas Hobbes
To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer
To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer
I do benefits for all religions – I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.
Bob Hope
Give us a religion that will help us to live – we can die without assistance.
Elbert Hubbard
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammedanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
Victor Hugo
Syncretinism is the most updated keyword of the modern catholic church.
Carl William Brown
Toleration is the best religion.
Victor Hugo
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
Dean William R. Inge
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
William James
I have tried to keep things in my hands and lost them all, but what I have given into the Lord’s hands I still possess.
Martin Luther King Jr.
A man with God is always in the majority.
John Knox
Perdition shall be the lot of man, except for those who have faith and do good works and exhort each other to justice and fortitude.
The Koran
When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.
Karl Kraus
To what excesses will men not go for the sake of a religion in which they believe so little and which they practice so imperfectly!
Jean De La Bruyere
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
C. S. Lewis
I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence.
Christopher Marlowe
Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The church burned my friend Giordano, and we don’t forget, we don’t forgive.
Carl William Brown
There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.
Suzanne Lafollette
My religion is very simple, my religion is kindness.
Dalai Lama
A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
D. H. Lawrence
A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
Joseph De Maistre
Even Voltaire said it: “If God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him!” And that’s exactly what our ancestors must have thought, too.
Carl William Brown
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
Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
Archbishop – A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H. L. Mencken
Thanksgiving is nothing if not a glad and reverent lifting of the heart to God in honor and praise for His goodness.
James R. Miller
Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it, ought to be treated as a common enemy.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind’s disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.
Gerard De Nerval
The Vatican has always been corrupted, first of all by stupidity.
Carl William Brown
From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.
John Henry Newman
A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
Reinhold Niebuhr
There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Sean O’Casey
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. And, the grace of God is the glue.
Eugene O’Neill
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine
Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.
Thomas Paine
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.
Blaise Pascal
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
Ezra Pound
A maker of idols is never an idolater.
Chinese Proverb
It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.
Edgar Quinet
It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.
Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
Bertrand Russell
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis De Sade
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana
It makes sense that there is no sense without God.
Edith Schaeffer
Progressive intellectuals spent decades of centuries freeing themselves from the imbecility of the Catholic religion, only to end up supporting the stupidity of Islam and its fanatical puppets.
Carl William Brown
My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
Gloria Steinem
If you have two religions in your country, they will cut each other’ throat; if you have thirty religions, they will live in peace.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.
Allen Tate
Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.
Tertullian
Call no man your father upon the earth, for one is your Father, which is in heaven.
The Holy Bible
Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.
The Holy Bible Source: Corinthians 4.2
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.
Paul Tillich
The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
Alexis De Tocqueville
I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious — except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.
Mark Twain
It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.
Mark Twain
A good test of a man’s religion is its vitality.
Author Unknown
Only happy people can learn. Only happy people can teach. Our religion should put a sparkle in our eyes and a tone in our voice, and a spring in our step that bears witness of our faith and confidence in the goodness of God.
Author Unknown
Buddhism believes in reincarnation, but this theory is unsuitable for the wise; in fact, it is better for so many imbeciles to remain in the realm of the dead.
Carl William Brown
Religion is a man using a divining rod. Philosophy is a man using a pick and shovel.
Author Unknown
Religion is insurance in this world against fire in the next.
Author Unknown
Religion is like holding on to a rock in the middle of a raging river; faith is learning how to swim.
Author Unknown
For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike
When it comes to money, everyone is of the same religion.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Not every religion has to have St. Augustine’s attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn’t prevent it being a religious ceremony.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Religion is love: in no case is it logic.
Beatrice Potter Webb
Can you tell a plain man the road to heaven? Certainly, turn at once to the right, then go straight forward.
William Wilberforce
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde
Don’t try to tear down other people’s religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it’s glories.
Brigham Young
By night an atheist half believes in God.
Edward Young
Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Fred A. Allen
The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
William Blake
Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
James Baldwin
Humanity’s spiritual, metaphysical, mystical, literary, and sociological beliefs are also very useful in promoting those stupid wars, also more vulgarly called, of religion.
Carl William Brown
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
Henry Ward Beecher
The test of Christian character should be that a man is a joy-bearing agent to the world.
Henry Ward Beecher
Christianity is art and not money. Money is its curse.
William Blake
Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord’s Prayer.
Napoleon Bonaparte
How natural that the errors of the ancient should be handed down and, mixing with the principles and system which Christ taught, give to us an adulterated Christianity.
Olympia Brown
If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s.
Samuel Butler
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
Samuel Butler
I have a great mind to believe in Christianity; for the mere pleasure of fancying, I may be damned.
Lord Byron
Christianity is completed Judaism or it is nothing.
Benjamin Disraeli
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
Herb Caen
What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
Albert Camus
With two thousand years of Christianity behind him… a man can’t see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The question is not ”How much may I indulge in and still be saved. God forbid! I must rather ask, ”What about Christ’s will and the example I set for my fellow Christians?”
Robert A. Cook
I have now disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian religion.
Patrick Henry
If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.
Mahatma Gandhi
White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.
Nikki Giovanni
The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.
Billy Graham
Being a Christian is more than just an instantaneous conversion; it is like a daily process whereby you grow to be more and more like Christ.
Billy Graham
Christianity is either relevant all the time or useless anytime. It is not just a phase of life; it is life itself.
Richard Halverson
It is only when all our Christian ancestors are allowed to become our contemporaries that the real splendor of the Christian faith and the Christian life begins to dawn upon us.
Lynn Harold Hough
The Christianity which is shared is the Christianity which is convincing.
Lynn Harold Hough
Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.
Samuel Johnson
God doesn’t have any grandchildren.
Eli Stanley Jones
Bear the Cross cheerfully and it will bear you.
Thomas a Kempis
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
Rudyard Kipling
I believe in Christianity as I believe in the rising sun; not because I see it, but by it I can see all else.
C. S. Lewis
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis
Regardless of the day or the hour; whether in seeming good times or bad, the Christian lives in the world for the good of the world and for the sake of the world.
Harold Lindsell
Christian life consists of faith and charity.
Martin Luther
Christians are rare people on earth.
Martin Luther
No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
A good example is far better than a good precept.
Dwight L. Moody
A rule I have had for years is: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. His is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but it is He Himself we have.
Dwight L. Moody
Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything He has commanded.
Dwight L. Moody
There are many of us that are willing to do great things for the Lord, but few of us are willing to do little things.
Dwight L. Moody
He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that, though it is not true, it has been found necessary to invent it.
Hector Hugh Munro
Christianity makes suffering contagious.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What if men take to following where He leads, weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds?
Roden Noel
Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.
Novalis
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell
To be like Christ is to be a Christian.
William Penn
Christianity is a battle not a dream.
Wendell Phillips
Many people profess Christianity. Very few live it – almost none. And when you live it people may think you’re crazy. It has been truthfully said that the world is equally shocked by one who repudiates Christianity as by one who practices it.
Peace Pilgrim
A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.
Edgar Allan Poe
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope
The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
George Bernard Shaw
Faith makes a Christian. Life proves a Christian. Trial confirms a Christian. Death crowns a Christian.
Author Unknown
Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.
Francis Schaeffer
Is your Christianity ancient history – or current events?
Samuel M. Shoemaker
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
If you make a great deal of Christ, He will make a great deal of you; But it you make but little of Christ, He will make but little of you.
R. A. Torrey
The Christian’s chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.
John R. Stott
If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.
C. T. Studd
But seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.
The Holy Bible
Peter said, “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, [rise and] walk.”
The Holy Bible
Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out: an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy.
The Holy Bible
Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment and its wars.
Count Leo Tolstoy
Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.
A. W. Tozer
Christianity, above all, has given a clear-cut answer to the demands of the human soul.
Author Unknown
Don’t feel superior just because you go to church, it doesn’t make you a Christian.
Author Unknown
One ABC of Christianity: “Always Be Cheerful”
Author Unknown
Christian means coming from Christ. Just as a Californian comes from California and a Bostonian is someone who comes from Boston, A Christian is one who comes from Christ.
Don Walk
The fear of hell, or aiming to be blest, savors too much of private interest.
Edmund Waller
A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
Thomas Ybarra
The trouble with some of us is that we have been inoculated with small doses of Christianity which keep us from catching the real thing.
Leslie Weatherhead
The spirit of Christian liberality will strengthen as it is exercised.
Ellen G. While
Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan – spoiled.
Israel Zangwill
Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination – everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.
John Adams )
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
Robert Browning
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Anthony Burgess
Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action – that the end will sanction any means.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A little skill in antiquity inclines a man to Popery.
Thomas Fuller
She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Today’s Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to remember the past.
Matthew Fox
Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it: that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and .
Eric Gill
For support, I fall back on my heart. Has a man any fault a woman cannot weave with and try to change into something better, if the god her man prays to is a mother holding a baby?
Haniel Long
She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It’s a painful religion. We’re all gluttons for punishment.
Madonna
You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
George Orwell
It is the custom of the Roman Church, which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.
Pope Gregory VII
If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
Muriel Spark
Coming to Rome, much labor and little profit! The King whom you seek here, unless you bring Him with you will not find Him.
Author Unknown
The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is woman being treated either as a Madonna or a Mary Magdalene.
Shirley Williams
The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
Fred A. Allen
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God’s work.
Brooks Atkinson
It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
Jane Austen
The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
Henry Ward Beecher
The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.
Robert Mcafee Brown
The church exists to train its member through the practice of the presence of God to be servants of others, to the end that Christlikeness may become common property.
William Adams Brown
Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.
John Calvin
I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.
George Carey
People have described me as a “management bishop” but I say to my critics, “Jesus was a management expert too.”
George Carey
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
Thomas Carlyle
A church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.
Henry Chadwick
An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.
William Cowper
A woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.
Mary Daly
And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny’s the worst.
Daniel Defoe
His creed no parson ever knew, for this was still his “simple plan,” to have with clergymen to do as little as a Christian can.
Sir Francis Doyle
There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.
Henry Fielding
The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.
Peter T. Forsyth
Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.
Thomas Fuller
Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.
Charles De Gaulle
Churchgoers are like coals in a fire. When they cling together, they keep the flame aglow; when they separate, they die out.
Billy Graham
It’s about time we quit playing church in these services that start at eleven o clock sharp and end at twelve o clock dull.
Vance Havner
Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave — with both ends kicked out.
Vance Havner
The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament, normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.
Vance Havner
What makes a church great in the eyes of God? Participation, proclamation, preservation, and propagation. Every church ought to exhibit all four.
O. S. Hawkins
I’m a priest, not a priestess. “Priestess” implies mumbo jumbo and all sorts of pagan goings-on. Those who oppose us would love to call us priestesses. They can call us all the names in the world – it’s better than being invisible.
Carter Heyward
But a priest’s life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one – pointed – a compass, not a weathercock.
Aldous Huxley
The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.
Robert Green Ingersoll
The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.
Lyndon B. Johnson )
This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.
Samuel Johnson
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
James Joyce
Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.
Martin Luther
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. Mencken
Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.
Dwight L. Moody
The difference between listening to a radio sermon and going to church…is almost like the difference between calling your girl on the phone and spending an evening with her.
Dwight L. Moody
The Christian church is a society of sinners. It is the only society in the world, membership in which is based upon the single qualification that the candidate shall be unworthy of membership.
Charles C. Morrison
The greatest hindrances to the evangelization of the world are those within the church.
John R. Mott
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
Iris Murdoch
A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
L. L. Nash
Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.
Edward Norman
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.
William Penn
Too hot to go to church? What about Hell?
Ohio, Poster in Dayton
Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
Ezra Pound
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Ezra Pound
He who is near the Church is often far from God.
French Proverb
Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.
Irish Proverb
In a small house God has His corner; in a big house, He has to stand in the hall.
Swedish Proverb
Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
John Ruskin
We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
George Bernard Shaw
The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.
Charlie Shedd
How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is “I will see you in the vestry after service.”
Sydney Smith
I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Sydney Smith
The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.
John Spong
I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Jonathan Swift
A little, round, fat, oily man of God.
James Thomson
I think a bishop who doesn’t give offence to anyone is probably not a good bishop.
James Thomson
One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
A. W. Tozer
A group touring Westminster Abbey in London heard the guide list the famous people buried within its walls. During a momentary silence a little old lady’s voice blurted out loud and clear, “Anybody been saved here lately?”
Author Unknown
Sign in lot: Church parking only. We will not forgive those who trespass against us.
Author Unknown
The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.
Sir Henry Wotton
Though the church has many critics, it has no rivals.
Author Unknown
The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share.
Alice Walker
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
Simone Weil
The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.
John Wesley
I don’t go to church; kneeling bags my nylons.
Billy Wilder
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James Baldwin
We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
Jimmy Carter
O unbelievers, I serve not what you serve and you are not serving what I serve, nor am I serving what you have served, neither are you serving what I serve. To you your religion, and to me my religion!
Qur’an
There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 % Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.
Theodore Roosevelt
If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!
Israel Zangwill
The Christian is not one who has gone all the way with Christ. None of us has. The Christian is one who has found the right road.
Charles L. Allen
Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel being, and being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: “the Son, O how unlike the Father!” First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.
William Blake
Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Phillips Brooks
A lot of people say to me, “Why did you kill Christ?” “I dunno… it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.” “We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why we killed him.”
Lenny Bruce
I love to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of His shoe in the earth, there have I coveted to put mine also.
John Bunyan
Each eye can have its vision separately; but when we are looking at anything… our vision, which in itself is divided, joins up and unites in order to give itself as a whole to the object that is put before it.
John Calvin
None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.
Lydia M. Child
The Lord has turned all our sunsets into sunrise.
Clement of Alexandria
The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.
Denis Diderot
The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being… can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain.
Henry Drummond
By a Carpenter mankind was made; and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.
Desiderius Erasmus
A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.
Mahatma Gandhi
Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.
Mikhail Gorbachev
No man ever loved like Jesus. He taught the blind to see and the dumb to speak. He died on the cross to save us. He bore our sins. And now God says, “Because He did, I can forgive you.”
Billy Graham
The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.
Billy Graham
Jesus Christ is God’s everything for man’s total need.
Richard Halverson
Jesus Christ turns life right-side-up, and heaven outside-in.
Carl F. H. Henry
I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange a virgin birth if He wanted, but I very much doubt if He would.
David Jenkins
He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
James Joyce
No one else holds or has held the place in the heart of the world, which Jesus holds. Other gods have been as devoutly worshipped; no other man has been so devoutly loved.
John Knox
Jesus says, “I love you just the way you are. And I love you too much to let you stay the way you are.”
Chris Lyons
We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary.
Alexander Maclaren
The greatest thing about any civilization is the human person, and the greatest thing about this person is the possibility of his encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.
Charles Malik
Jesus promised His disciples three things: that they would be entirely fearless, absurdly happy, and that they would get into trouble.
Russell W. Maltby
I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.
Mother Teresa
The word “Christianity” is already a misunderstanding — in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A heroic figure… not wholly to blame for the religion that’s been foisted on him.
Ezra Pound
Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners.
Camille Paglia
Only Christ could have conceived Christ.
Joseph Parker
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal
God speaks to me not through the thunder and the earthquake, nor through the ocean and the stars, but through the Son of Man, and speaks in a language adapted to my imperfect sight and hearing.
William Lyon Phelps
Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet – a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.
Frederick W. Robertson
Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.
St. Francis of Assisi
The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The name of Jesus is as ointment poured forth; It nourishes, and illumines, and stills the anguish of the soul.
Angelus Silesius
Jesus whom I know as my Redeemer cannot be less than God.
St. Athanasius
I am pretty sure that we err in treating these sayings as paradoxes. It would be nearer the truth to say that it is life itself which is paradoxical and that the sayings of Jesus are simply a recognition of that fact.
Thomas Taylor
I thank God for the honesty and virility of Jesus religion which makes us face the facts and calls us to take a man’s part in the real battle of life.
Henry Van Dyke
Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
Simone Weil
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
James Baldwin
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
Dean William R. Inge
Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.
Wright C. Mills
What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?
Edgar Quinet
All of our institutions must now turn their full attention to the great task ahead – to humanize our lives and thus to humanize our society.
James Perkins
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Henry David Thoreau
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Thoughts and reflections on religion
