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QUOTES ABOUT RELIGION

Quotes about religion reflect humanity’s enduring search for meaning, purpose, and the sacred. They express faith, doubt, devotion, and reflection across cultures and traditions. The following collection offers perspectives that invite contemplation on belief and the role it plays in human life.   ◀ Back
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Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.
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The faith is not the problem, Bernadette. The problem is the faithful.
- Robert Ferrigno
Prayers for the Assassin
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Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
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You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.
- Douglas Coupland
Generation A
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Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
- Anne Lamott
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
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One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.
- H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken on Religion
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Immorality is the word we use to describe people that are not sinning the same way we are.
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I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.
- G. Willow Wilson
Alif the Unseen
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I do not know whether you draw a distinction between principles and rules. But I do... Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things according to prescription. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things... The principle may be wrong, but the act is conscious and responsible. The rule may be right, but the act is mechanical. A religious act may not be a correct act, but must at least be a responsible act. To permit this responsibility, religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules it ceases to be religion, as it kills the responsibility which is the essence of a truly religious act.
- B.R. Ambedkar
Annihilation of Caste
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If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Human psychology is that anything you do in a group feels right. People as a group can kill someone and call it religious because it feels right to them. Religion and righteousness are not the same thing. Religion is about going beyond right and wrong and seeing things as they are without any prejudices and judgements.
- Shunya
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God is not interested in your art but, your heart.
- Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
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You would have realized that it wasn't Mumtaz, a muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn't have killed the bastard in him; similarly, assuming that he was a Muslim, you wouldn't have killed his Muslimness, but him.
- Saadat Hasan Manto
Toba Tek Singh: Stories
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Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
- Gore Vidal
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But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?'

'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished...
- Anthony Burgess
The Wanting Seed
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So, many years later there were many who still complained and questioned, ‘Why must you pick up Christians and Hindus in your ambulance?’ And I was saying, ‘Because the ambulance is more Muslim than you’.
- Abdul Sattar Edhi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Amendment to live by-
J.O.Y.

Jesus first,
Others second,
Yourself last.
- Michelle Duggar
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt--and still feel--that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.
- Karen Armstrong
A Short History of Myth
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An eternity of wishing to speak directly to my Creator - I thought in despair - and this is how He finally contacts me? Through AOL Instant Messenger?
- A.M. Jenkins
Repossessed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Peace, sweet peace finally comes to men when they humbly yield to the gentle pressure of the Spirit.
- Spencer W. Kimball
Faith Precedes the Miracle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know how it goes:
at some point in your life,
you fell in love with someone
and had a glimpse of God.
Then you abandoned life and lover
and started celebrating
your love for God.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?
- John Irving
A Prayer for Owen Meany
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The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.
- Swami Vivekananda
Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 Vols.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
- Dan Simmons
The Fall of Hyperion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The faith is not the problem, Bernadette. The problem is the faithful.
- Robert Ferrigno
Prayers for the Assassin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.
- Douglas Coupland
Generation A
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
- Anne Lamott
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.
- H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken on Religion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Immorality is the word we use to describe people that are not sinning the same way we are.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.
- G. Willow Wilson
Alif the Unseen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I do not know whether you draw a distinction between principles and rules. But I do... Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things according to prescription. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things... The principle may be wrong, but the act is conscious and responsible. The rule may be right, but the act is mechanical. A religious act may not be a correct act, but must at least be a responsible act. To permit this responsibility, religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules it ceases to be religion, as it kills the responsibility which is the essence of a truly religious act.
- B.R. Ambedkar
Annihilation of Caste
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Human psychology is that anything you do in a group feels right. People as a group can kill someone and call it religious because it feels right to them. Religion and righteousness are not the same thing. Religion is about going beyond right and wrong and seeing things as they are without any prejudices and judgements.
- Shunya
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God is not interested in your art but, your heart.
- Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You would have realized that it wasn't Mumtaz, a muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn't have killed the bastard in him; similarly, assuming that he was a Muslim, you wouldn't have killed his Muslimness, but him.
- Saadat Hasan Manto
Toba Tek Singh: Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
- Gore Vidal
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?'

'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished...
- Anthony Burgess
The Wanting Seed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
So, many years later there were many who still complained and questioned, ‘Why must you pick up Christians and Hindus in your ambulance?’ And I was saying, ‘Because the ambulance is more Muslim than you’.
- Abdul Sattar Edhi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Amendment to live by-
J.O.Y.

Jesus first,
Others second,
Yourself last.
- Michelle Duggar
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt--and still feel--that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.
- Karen Armstrong
A Short History of Myth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
An eternity of wishing to speak directly to my Creator - I thought in despair - and this is how He finally contacts me? Through AOL Instant Messenger?
- A.M. Jenkins
Repossessed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Peace, sweet peace finally comes to men when they humbly yield to the gentle pressure of the Spirit.
- Spencer W. Kimball
Faith Precedes the Miracle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know how it goes:
at some point in your life,
you fell in love with someone
and had a glimpse of God.
Then you abandoned life and lover
and started celebrating
your love for God.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?
- John Irving
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.
- Swami Vivekananda
Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 Vols.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
- Dan Simmons
The Fall of Hyperion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The faith is not the problem, Bernadette. The problem is the faithful.
- Robert Ferrigno
Prayers for the Assassin
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.
- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.
- Douglas Coupland
Generation A
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
- Anne Lamott
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.
- H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken on Religion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Immorality is the word we use to describe people that are not sinning the same way we are.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.
- G. Willow Wilson
Alif the Unseen
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I do not know whether you draw a distinction between principles and rules. But I do... Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things according to prescription. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things... The principle may be wrong, but the act is conscious and responsible. The rule may be right, but the act is mechanical. A religious act may not be a correct act, but must at least be a responsible act. To permit this responsibility, religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules it ceases to be religion, as it kills the responsibility which is the essence of a truly religious act.
- B.R. Ambedkar
Annihilation of Caste
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Human psychology is that anything you do in a group feels right. People as a group can kill someone and call it religious because it feels right to them. Religion and righteousness are not the same thing. Religion is about going beyond right and wrong and seeing things as they are without any prejudices and judgements.
- Shunya
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
God is not interested in your art but, your heart.
- Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You would have realized that it wasn't Mumtaz, a muslim, a friend of yours, but a human being you had killed. I mean, if he was a bastard, by killing him you wouldn't have killed the bastard in him; similarly, assuming that he was a Muslim, you wouldn't have killed his Muslimness, but him.
- Saadat Hasan Manto
Toba Tek Singh: Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
- Gore Vidal
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?'

'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished...
- Anthony Burgess
The Wanting Seed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
So, many years later there were many who still complained and questioned, ‘Why must you pick up Christians and Hindus in your ambulance?’ And I was saying, ‘Because the ambulance is more Muslim than you’.
- Abdul Sattar Edhi
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Amendment to live by-
J.O.Y.

Jesus first,
Others second,
Yourself last.
- Michelle Duggar
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt--and still feel--that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.
- Karen Armstrong
A Short History of Myth
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
An eternity of wishing to speak directly to my Creator - I thought in despair - and this is how He finally contacts me? Through AOL Instant Messenger?
- A.M. Jenkins
Repossessed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Peace, sweet peace finally comes to men when they humbly yield to the gentle pressure of the Spirit.
- Spencer W. Kimball
Faith Precedes the Miracle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know how it goes:
at some point in your life,
you fell in love with someone
and had a glimpse of God.
Then you abandoned life and lover
and started celebrating
your love for God.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?
- John Irving
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.
- Swami Vivekananda
Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 Vols.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
- Dan Simmons
The Fall of Hyperion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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