Faith Religion Quotes

I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive. ~ Natasha Pulley

I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. ~ Gordon Brown

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance. ~ Eric Hoffer

Sol in Sagittarius

Sagittarius governs faith, religion, writings, bookes, and the interpretation of dreames.
Those born under the signe of the archer shall work great wonders and receive much honour and joye.
While Sagittarius rules the heavens, consult with lawyers about thy business.
It is a good season for making oaths and striking bargains. ~ Deborah Harkness

Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

People are valuable, Mistress Vin, and so - therefore - are their beliefs. ~ Brandon Sanderson

What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it. ~ Christian Wiman

Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I cannot, of course, prove that there is no supervising deity who invigilates my every moment
and who will pursue me even after I am dead. (I can only be happy that there is no evidence for
such a ghastly idea, which would resemble a celestial North Korea in which liberty was not just
impossible but inconceivable.) But nor has any theologian ever demonstrated the contrary. This
would perhaps make the believer and the doubter equal - except that the believer claims to know,
not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually
known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and
considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can
tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these
terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. This tyrannical idea is very much older than
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Christianity, of course, but I do sometimes think that Christians have less excuse for believing, let
alone wishing, that such a horrible thing could be true. ~ Christopher Hitchens

We do not teach and practice community of goods but we teach and testify the Word of the Lord, that all true believers in Christ are of one body (I Cor. 12:13), partakers of one bread (I Cor. 10:17), have one God and one Lord (Eph. 4). Seeing then that they are one, ... it is Christian and reasonable that they also have divine love among them and that one member cares for another, for both the Scriptures and nature teach this. They show mercy and love, as much as is in them. They do not suffer a beggar among them. They have pity on the wants of the saints. They receive the wretched. They take strangers into their houses. They comfort the sad. They lend to the needy. They clothe the naked. They share their bread with the hungry. They do not turn their face from the poor nor do they regard their decrepit limbs and flesh (Isa. 58). This is the kind of brotherhood we teach. ~ Menno Simons

If faith is lost, there is no security and there is no life for him who does not adhere to religion. ~ Muhammad Iqbal

The religionist is a living fossil, embedded in that rock called faith. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

None of that means my family's not spiritual. (Though what happened to Marvin has put me at odds with God these days.) To their credit, our parents have spent considerable time discussing the difference between Faith - the abiding belief in a Divine Creator that's as plain a part of a hundred-year-old oak tree, or a fiery red sunset, as the nose on your face - and Religion - which is the rigamarole that makes some folks figure they've got a leg up on everybody else. ~ Susan Carol McCarthy

The thing about me is, I don't care what religion you are. If someone is attacking your religion, I will have your back, and I will defend you. I think that is the most repulsive thing a person can do, attack another person's faith. ~ Kirstie Alley

Some people say hockey is like religion, but that's wrong. Hockey is like faith. Religion is something between you and other people; it's full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith...that's just between you and God. It's what you feel in your chest when the referee glides out to the center circle between two players, when you hear the sticks strike each other and see the black disk fall between them. Then it's just between you and hockey. Because cherry trees always smell of cherry trees, whereas money smells of nothing ~ Fredrik Backman

Evidence is of no longer consequence when hope enters the fray, and this is
where faith is born - a seemingly abundant commodity certain powerful
organizations feed on fervently, if not lavishly. ~ Justin Villanueva

If my God damns people for love but saves them for brutle warfare, then that is not the God I know or wish to worship. ~ Cristina Marrero

I do not preach doubtingly, for I do not live doubtingly. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

[Ilse] was suffering so keenly that she wanted to arraign the universe at the bar of her pain. ~ L.M. Montgomery

The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan. ~ Georges Bernanos

Those who have loved are those that have found God ~ Guru Nanak

But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Young people all over the world are very frustrated. They are very disillusioned. Many of them are turning their backs on religion. They are walking away from the faith of their parents, and most of this is because religion has failed them. ~ Myles Munroe

I can only say that I am nothing but a poor sinner, trusting in Christ alone for salvation. ~ Robert E.Lee

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. ~ Epicurus

The most sublime efforts of philosophy can extend no farther than feebly to point out the desire, the hope, or, at most, the probability, of a future state, there is nothing, except a divine revelation, that can ascertain the existence, and describe the condition of the invisible country which is destined to receive the souls of men after their separation from the body. ~ Edward Gibbon

Most Muslims do not 'choose' Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion. ~ Mohsin Hamid

He respected the power of faith, the benevolence of churches, the strength religion gave so many people ... and yet, for him, the one intellectual suspension of disbelief that was imperative if one were truly going to "believe" had always proved too big an obstacle for his academic mind. "I want to believe," he heard himself say. ~ Dan Brown

The true nature of the Christian's bondage is this: faith commands his every move, his every thought, and his every inclination. Moreover, because faith is tenacious by nature, and because it comes with this attendant stigma that angering God is unwise, the Christian is tempted - no, compelled to err on the side of his faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence that proves the contrary. ~ Michael Vito Tosto

Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise? ~ Robert Harris

All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism ~ Jon Krakauer

I hold that religion and faith are two different things. ~ Pat Buckley

The believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I wanted tolerance. I wanted everybody to leave everybody else alone, regardless of their religious beliefs, regardless of their political affiliation. I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy. I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God. ~ Donald Miller

You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

People whom live in a world dominated by science and technology are losing belief in God and turning away from religion. Science eliminated the traditions that formerly made living an art form including the rain celebration of spring and traditional harvest festivals. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Always listen to your conscience. If your conscience conflicts with your faith, question everything. You discover your true faith when you start flowing with your conscience. After lessons, visions, and theories validate themselves to you, you begin to build faith in that hypothesis/feeling/idea that originated from your own heart and mind -- not that of others. Before you submit to any one religion, create your own first and then find out which one out there resonates closest with the one already in your heart. ~ Suzy Kassem

We certainly love the Muslim people. But that is not the faith of this country. And that is not the religion that built this nation. The people of the Christian faith and the Jewish faith are the ones who built America, and it is not Islam. ~ Franklin Graham

I believe in something transcendent, but I've yet to meet someone with a convincing label for it. ~ Alex Mar

Don't be confused that my interest in religion, faith, and spirituality is driven by any sense of faith or spirituality of my own. ~ Peter Jennings

I think there's nothing better in the world than a spirited discussion about the Bible and Jesus and God and the Catholic faith, or the Jewish faith, or the Muslim faith - any religion. ~ Elizabeth Vargas

Faith is underrated. Paradoxically, religion is vastly overrated. ~ Seth Godin

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. ~ C.S. Lewis

The enemies of the Christian religion and the Law of God confuse law with faith. ~ Randall Terry

The practice of Right Action is a practice of faith, a faith that says what we do matters. We matter. And whether we're refilling the coffee pot at work or speaking in front of a crowd of thousands, we have the power to change the world one small act at a time. ~ Alex Kakuyo

I'm not a practice religion freak. I didn't grow up in a religious family, but I have a faith. ~ Robin Wright

There is more hope in honest brokenness than in the pretense of false wholeness. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

Faith, he had learned that night in front of the flickering television, was most glorious when it was most untouched by reason. ~ Michael Thomas Ford

The origin of the Form Destroyer is unclear; it is, for instance, not possible to declare whether (one) he was a separate entity from God from the start, uncreated by God but also self-creating, as is God, or (two) whether the Form Destroyer is an aspect of God... ~ Philip K. Dick

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. ~ Richard Dawkins

Some would rather pull a handcart across the prairie than bring up the subject of faith and religion to their friends and co-workers. They worry about how they might be perceived or how it might harm their relationship. It doesn't need to be that way because we have a glad message to share, and we have a message of joy. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

I don't like dogmas; i don't want to be kept in a box ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

A human being must have an auxiliary means of discovering the truth, a means that exists outside of his own belief or outside any alleged revelation. Otherwise…well, who's to say he isn't insane? ~ Michael Vito Tosto

Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others. ~ Georg Solti

I had never told Bonnie this, but I always respected her faith more than my own. Her faith was a conscious decision, a hard-earned achievement, constantly evolving to deal with her family's agnosticism and her own bisexuality. I wore my own faith like the shirt I fell asleep in because I was too lazy to change. ~ Lianne Oelke

It doesn't matter what tradition you come from, what religion you have or don't, what culture you were brought up in or what God you ascribe to: Faith is worthwhile as it helps us to be kinder, more generous, more loving and forgiving people. ~ Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick

It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. ~ Thomas Paine

We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out. ~ Adolf Hitler

Our religion does not discriminate according to color, sex or anything else. What counts is piety and faith. ~ King Hussein I

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. ~ William James

It's also reflective of a young person's religion or faith in that it's highly charged with sacramental imagery and with country imagery, because I was in the seminary for so many years in the country. ~ Daniel Berrigan

I am sensitive to the value of faith and religion and spirituality in people's lives because I'm a journalist. ~ Peter Jennings

At times , he didn't understand the meaning of the Koran's words . But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue . He said they comforted him , eased his heart . "They'll comfort you too . Mrariam jo , " he said . "You can summon then in your time of your need , and they won't fail you . God's words will never betray you , my girl . (pg.17) ~ Khaled Hosseini

Ironically, the only people anyone believes these days are the skeptics. ~ J.S.B. Morse

Religion is for followers ... Followers and puppets. ~ Ellen Hopkins

When you run a company, you need to be pretty open-minded. There are a lot of different views on faith, on religion, on many different issues, and you can't let your own faith be the barometer. ~ Greg Brenneman

I've long been really intrigued with what is the ... proper role of faith and religion in public life. ~ Gene Robinson

Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories ... legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hands? ~ Dan Brown

Many churches of all persuasions are hiring research agencies to poll neighborhoods, asking what kind of church they prefer. Then the local churches design themselves to fit the desires of the people. True faith in God that demands selflessness is being replaced by trendy religion that serves the selfish. ~ Billy Graham

The will to believe has given us our great saints. The will to doubt has given us our great scientists. The goal of the intelligent man is a character in which the will to believe of the saint and the will to doubt of the scientist meet and mingle. ~ Glenn Frank

There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. As if the Good Lord had nothing better to do than exist! ~ C.S. Lewis

Church is not about learning how to be a moral person (though that is what the dominant narrative they hear tells them); it is a place where immoral individuals go in order to receive the grace of God. ~ Jonathan P. Hill

It is a masterpiece of the devil to make us believe that children cannot understand religion. Would Christ have made a child the standard of faith if He had known that it was not capable of understanding His words? ~ Dwight L. Moody

I've always felt like there are certain politicians that wear their religion on their sleeve in a way that you almost feel is disingenuous. I think that your faith has to be first personal. I struggle with those people that preach something and go back behind closed doors and live differently. ~ Nikki Haley

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science. ~ Gary Zukav

Celebrating faith over reason is merely a way of denying what is, in favor of embracing any whim that strikes your fancy. ~ Terry Goodkind

While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane. ~ Sam Harris

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God ~ Thomas Jefferson

Like a lot of once devout people who have lost their faith, I had holes the size of heaven and hell in my head and in my heart. ~ Sarah Vowell

It is a strange thing how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits. You thought you were unhappy because this or that was off in your relationship, this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance of, God. The other problems may very well be true, and you will have to address them, but what you feel when releasing yourself to speak of the deepest needs of your spirit is the fact that no other needs could be spoken of outside of that context. You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being in unsure. ~ Christian Wiman

Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all. ~ Will Durant

It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it. ~ Nick Harkaway

In the same way as some illiterate, if he saw an open book, would notice the figures, but would not comprehend the letters, so also the stupid and 'animal man' who 'does not perceive the things of God', may see the outward appearance of these visible creatures, but does not understand the reason within. ~ Hugh Of Saint-Victor

Let me repeat: the stakes are high. We must confront one of the most massive pseudo-evidences in recent intellectual history: the belief, rampant in Europe since only two or three centuries ago, in the existence of 'religions' - and more than that, against the unverified faith in the existence of faith. Faith in the existence of 'religion' is the element that unites believers and non-believers, in the present as much as in the past. It displays a single-mindedness that would make any prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome green with envy. No one who overcame religion ever doubted its existence, even if they opposed every single one of its dogmas. No denial ever confronted the denier with the question of whether its name was justified, and whether it had any lasting value in such a form. It is only because society has grown accustomed to a comparatively recent fiction - it did not come into use until the seventeenth century - that one can speak today of a 'return of religion'.' It is the unbroken faith in religion as a constant and universal factor which can vanish and return that forms the foundation of the current legend. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

In response to a letter regarding the writer's lack of religious belief:
The lack of faith is not doubt. It is certainty. ~ Abigail Van Buren

A life based on [religious] faith is a life based on pure speculation, and speculation is, by its very definition, unsound. ~ Michael Vito Tosto

I am, perhaps, too intellectual, too modern, for my own comfort! How lovely it would be to sink into the warm comfort of established religion. ~ Lisa Tuttle

Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so. ~ Marilynne Robinson

My grandmother studied medicine in the Forties, which was very rare in Egypt, and my mother was a university professor, so my idea of religion wasn't about a woman not working or having to dress in a certain way; it was more to do with the faith. ~ Leila Aboulela

The words & deeds of those who are rightly guided speak for themselves.They need no force to spread their faith ~ Mirza Masroor Ahmad

The word 'religion' is only a label. What lies behind that, the most important thing of all, is the word 'faith'. You either have faith, or you don't have faith, or you have degrees of faith - and if you have degrees of faith, then you become agnostic. You're kind of in-between, or you're on the fence. ~ Ridley Scott

In the absence of fear there is little faith. ~ Michael Palin

Blasphemy is the crime of not taking someone's beliefs as seriously as they do. ~ Jasper Sole

The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind. ~ Thomas Paine

Maybe faith really is the answer. ~ Tucker Elliot

Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?

...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can. ~ Peter Atkins

As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it. ~ Dinaw Mengestu

His point, again and again, was that truth wasn't the property of any one faith and that, if you looked closely, you found a ground where they all converged. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

As a diminutive woman I didn't take any offense at all at sometimes being referred to as 'the weaker vessel', but Magali was almost comically enraged by it. ~ Gillian Dance