Religion Philosophy Quotes

We can't worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer. ~ David Cronenberg

What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? These questions are common to religion, philosophy, and higher poetry ~ Muhammad Iqbal

Only the sixth sense can expose what the other five have hidden. ~ Matthew A. Petti

If Christians read the Holy Bible, they know the Lord Jesus Christ. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All good moral philosophy is ... but the handmaid to religion. ~ Francis Bacon

If you don't act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions. ~ Steve Hackett

The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion. ~ Donald M. MacKinnon

Human beings have never agreed whether or not there is only one universal or sacred divine entity in a supposedly glorious and transcendent place. ~ Duop Chak Wuol

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… patent offices handle an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them. ~ James Randi

Mysteries are the evidence to errors in our religious and historical precepts. ~ Matthew A. Petti

How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with each other for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us. ~ Laura Riding

My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another. ~ Art Linkletter

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity. ~ Alfred De Vigny

A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity. ~ Edward Abbey

If there's good, strong evidence from science that such and such is the case and this is contrary to Buddhism, then we will change. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. ~ Irvine Welsh

In the hands of thinking humanity, the purpose of the tool of Divinity or Religion is not the service of bookish doctrines, but the realization of the self. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why. ~ Eric Gill

Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol.
Eastern and Western Thinking, 1938 ~ C. G. Jung

When I was a student, I studied philosophy and religion. I talked about being patient. Some people say I was too hopeful, too optimistic, but you have to be optimistic just in keeping with the philosophy of non-violence. ~ John Lewis

Rituals are like electrically powered transmitters sending stimulating sparks of electric current or inspirational feelings that connect us to our inner being or soul. ~ Wes Adamson

I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory. ~ F. Sionil Jose

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish. ~ David Hume

Yoga, as a way of life and a philosophy, can be practiced by anyone with inclination to undertake it, for yoga belongs to humanity as a whole. It is not the property of any one group or any one individual, but can be followed by any and all, in any corner of the globe, regardless of class, creed or religion. ~ K. Pattabhi Jois

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

His (the Christian God) type of gods aren't gods who echo how mortals behave. They're gods who are held up as example of perfection to be emulated. There's not gods of the people. They're remote and inaccessible, and they demand blind, unthinking obedience from their followers. They're dictators. We Aesir and Vanir, by contrast, are mirrors. Other gods rule. We reflect and magnify. We are you, only more so. We share your flaws and foibles. We are as humanlike as we are divine, and I think we're all the better for that. ~ James Lovegrove

Any religion is an illusion to others ~ Oscar Wilde

The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on. ~ Julian Baggini

Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Ah, yes- 'God is love' and all that rot. Tell me, have you ever really stopped to think about what that means? Love is cruel. Love is vicious. Love inspires people to kill, to maim, to torture. Love ruins lives, fells cities, destroys civilizations. If you ask me, love's not all it's cracked up to be. But then, you shouldn't have to ask me - you should only have to reflect on where love has gotten you. - Lilith ~ Chris Holm

Animals learn death first at the moment of death; ... man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.) ~ Alvin Plantinga

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy. ~ George Gurdjieff

Have a religion but don't let religion have you! Befriend God because you wanted to, not because they have said it to you. ~ Janina Lea Dela Pena

God cannot judge me, he has no religion! ~ Tarique Siddique Mohammed

In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task ... ~ Albert Einstein

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is 'The Brothers Karamazov.' ~ Charlie Trotter

Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now possible, and we are that complexity. We are nature moving out of its genetic phase - a phase under the control of chemical genes, which are physical structures, in to an epigenetic phase, a phase of culture ruled by codes, transformable culturally confined codes - mathematics, religion, philosophy, art, dance, humor. ~ Terence McKenna

The world will not change by our position in the Universe. Actions change when beliefs change; collective actions and beliefs change the world. ~ Matthew A. Petti

He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion! ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Everybody in this family gets his goddamn religion in a different package. ~ J.D. Salinger

In our country religion is not different from philosophy and religion & philosophy don't differ from science. ~ Virchand Gandhi

You the human are the highest temple of God. I would rather worship you, than worship any temple, image or book. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Religion and philosophy, philosophy and religion - they're two words which are both ... different. In spelling. ~ Eddie Izzard

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Often there are two different reasons given for this natural desire to simplify. First is that we as humans have a very limited imagination and whichever medium we use to understand the world - be it science, religion, philosophy, or art -we will end up exploting the same limited set of ideas available to us. ~ Vlatko Vedral

The more a religion makes a person feel guilty and insecure, the harder the person works for the religion. ~ Darrel Ray

There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Good people end up in Hell because they can't forgive themselves. ~ Robin Williams

I don't subscribe to any religion so it didn't matter to me if I prayed in a shrine, temple, or church. Butbe cause I was asking for so much I assumed Buddha and the Christian God wouldn't even listen ~ Novala Takemoto

Peace is a fresh flower. ~ Debasish Mridha

Illness itself can make you angry, enraged, furious, and it made me angry, enraged, and furious. I don't think it brought me to God at all. It depends how you deal with it. And I think that, at its best, three little words that always have to be applied to religion, religion can help you to deal with that. ~ Karen Armstrong

Perpetual possibilities exist to win the game of life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You may spoil the Gospel by substitution. You have only to withdraw from the eyes of the sinner the grand object which the Bible proposes to faith, - Jesus Christ; and to substitute another object in His place, - the Church, the Ministry, the Confessional, Baptism or the Lord's Supper, - and the mischief is done. Substitute anything for Christ, and the Gospel is totally spoiled! Do this, either directly or indirectly, and your religion ceases to be Evangelical. ~ J.C. Ryle

On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was. ~ Nenia Campbell

All is safe where all can read," is a quotation from Thomas Jefferson showing his belief in the importance of everyone knowing how to and being able/allowed to read. I would like to take it one step further.
I would say, "All is BETTER when all can read." No matter what you like to read, the ability to read it, understand it, and enjoy it, truly enriches your life. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Adopting the language of a pretense only serves to ease participation in it. ~ Bartok, Last Knights

If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off. ~ Agatha Christie

In the end, we must remember that no one can become what they need to be by remaining where the are. Until there is motion nothing can change. ~ GE Paulus

When one is born into a religion that is not too unsuitable for pronouncing the name of the Lord, when one loves that native religion, well-oriented and pure, it is difficult to conceive of a legitimate motive to abandon it before direct contact with God offers the soul to the divine will itself. Beyond this threshold, the change is only legitimate as an act of obedience. In fact history shows how this rarely happens. More often - perhaps always - the soul that reaches the highest spiritual regions is confirmed in the love of the tradition that served as its ladder. If the imperfection of the native religion is too great, or if it appears in a native environment under a form that is too corrupt, or if circumstances prevent that religion from being born or even kills it, the adoption of a strange religion is legitimate. Legitimate and necessary for certain people; not, without a doubt, for all. It is the same for those who have been raised without any religious practice. In all other cases, to change religions is an extremely grave (serious) decision and it is even more serious to push someone else to do so. It is still an infinitely more serious exercise, in this sense, to officially apply such pressure upon conquered lands. ~ Simone Weil

But what they find most amazing and despicable is the insanity of those who all but worship the rich, to whom they owe nothing and who can do them no harm; they do so for no other reason except that they are rich, knowing full well that they are so mean and tightfisted that they will certainly never give them one red cent during their whole lives. ~ Thomas More

Your actions and devotion define your destination. ~ Debasish Mridha

Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code. ~ Bertrand Russell

We have written the equations of water flow. From experiment, we find a set of concepts and approximations to use to discuss the solution--vortex streets, turbulent wakes, boundary layers. When we have similar equations in a less familiar situation, and one for which we cannot yet experiment, we try to solve the equations in a primitive, halting, and confused way to try to determine what new qualitatitive features may come out, or what new qualitative forms are a consequence of the equations. Our equations for the sun, for example, as a ball of hydrogen gas, describe a sun without sunspots, without the rice-grain structure of the surface, without prominences, without coronas. Yet, all of these are really in the equations; we just haven't found the way to get them out.

...The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colourful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets--those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust clouds and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics.

The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotatin ~ Richard P. Feynman

A Finnan haddock has a relish of a peculiar and delicate flavour, inimitable on any other coast than that of Aberdeenshire. Some of our Edinburgh philosophers tried to produce their equal in vain. I was one of a party at dinner where the philosophical haddocks were placed in competition with the genuine Finnan fish. These were served round without distinguishing whence they came; but only one gentleman out of twelve present espoused the cause of philosophy. ~ Walter Scott

I like the confusion you get between science and religion ... that's where belief lies and art as well. ~ Damien Hirst

You can truly value life, when you have looked Death in the eyes and held its hand. ~ Lionel Suggs

The Yoruba religion is the science of allowing God to flow through you, so that each breath becomes a prayer, and as God breathes, you breathe. ~ Tobe Melora Correal

If God objected to [people with various handicaps], he ought not have created such people. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value. ~ Albert Einstein

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure ~ Karl Wiggins

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. ~ Allen Ginsberg

It's less about technology for me, and more about religion. [on hacking] ~ Adrian Lamo

Paul Erdos has a theory that God has a book containing all the theorems of mathematics with their absolutely most beautiful proofs, and when he wants to express particular appreciation of a proof he exclaims, "This is from the book!" ~ Ross Honsberger

O my beloved! Wherever I am, I am with you always because you are always in my heart. ~ Debasish Mridha

It's fun to invent systems and meanings and then poke holes in them. ~ Marty Rubin

I believe that hope, imagination, and dreams create our destiny. ~ Debasish Mridha

Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of "speaking for" a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practised, and are still practising so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees [ ... ] At any rate, I know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last. ~ Henry David Thoreau

This causation exists as a streamed organization of constantly fluid potential. Anything that can be must first hold the streaming potential to be. It is soul.
It is always potential. It is never static. It is never rigid. Its essence is all these, which means it can not be anything other and be the Primal Cause. It is never nothing. Nothing does not exist with it. It is something. It is anything. It is everything. At the same time! Just like your consciousness. Pure Unordered Potential! ~ Dew Platt

Good books are the real recorded source of good thoughts all times & every where !! ~ M K Gandhi

Philosophy is the Devil's Whore ~ Martin Luther

Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion. ~ Ruth St. Denis

Our emotions dance in the paradox of love and fear. ~ Debasish Mridha

But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants. ~ Julius Evola

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. ~ Robert Frost

The greatest religion gives suffering to nobody," reads a weather-beaten sign, quoting the Buddha, at Chele La pass, the highest motorable point in the country, near Paro. This maxim is everywhere evident. As a Bhutanese friend and I walked in the mountains one afternoon, he reflexively removed insects from the path and gently placed them in the verge, out of harm's way. Early one morning in Thimphu, I saw a group of young schoolboys, in their spotless white-sleeved ghos, crouching over a mouse on the street, gently offering it food. In Bhutan, the horses that trudge up the steep trail to the Tiger's Nest monastery are reserved for out-of-shape tourists; Bhutanese don't consider horses beasts of burden and prefer not to make them suffer under heavy loads. Even harvesting honey is considered a sign of disrespect for the industrious bees; my young guide, Kezang, admonished me for buying a bottle of Bhutanese honey to take home. (Chastened, I left it there.) In ~ Madeline Drexler

Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science. ~ Max Planck

What you get is the opening of your mind. I'm not preaching any new religion; I'm ritualizing everyday activities. You drink the water. You count the rice. You sit in Crystal Cave. You lie in Levitation Chamber. You push yourself to a new level. ~ Marina Abramovic

Only religion can lead to such evil. ~ Lucretius

Life can only be experienced in myriad of intricate forms, but can be understood only in abstract.
Here/Now/Present is the doorway to abstract - the divine nothingness ~ Rashmit Kalra

We're all God. I'm not a god or the God, but we're all God and we're all potentially divine-and potentially evil. ~ John Lennon

The desideratum of the philosophy "better to have never been" is parents being charged with manslaughter for bringing children into the world ~ Dean Cavanagh

I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do. ~ Alasdair Gray

We believe that the creation of a woman was the crowning and final and most glorified moment of human creation. That we start with light & dark and land & sea and we move through fish & fowl & beasts of the field and we get to Adam and it's still not good enough. And only when Eve was created
this is our theology [ ... ]
that is our theology, that the crowning creation and the glory of the human experience came with the creation of Eve. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland