Religions And Prophets Quotes

To realize the truth, you have to cross the boundaries of all religions and prophets. ~ Amit Ray

Spirituality is not making walls in the names of religions and prophets but to make more roads and bridges to reconnect with humanity. ~ Amit Ray

O guide my judgment and my taste,
Sweet Spirit, author of the book
Of wonders, told in language chaste
And plainness, not to be mistook.

O let me muse, and yet at sight
The page admire, the page believe;
"Let there be light, and there was light,
Let there be Paradise and Eve!"

Who his soul's rapture can refrain?
At Joseph's ever pleasing tale
Of marvels, the prodigious train,
To Sinai's hill from Goshen's vale.

The psalmist and proverbial seer,
And all the prophets sons of song,
Make all things precious, all things dear,
And bear the brilliant word along.

O take the book from off the shelf,
And con it meekly on thy knees;
Best panegyric on itself,
And self-avouch'd to teach and please.

Respect, adore it heart and mind.
How greatly sweet, how sweetly grand,
Who reads the most, is most refind'd,
And polish'd by the Master's hand. ~ Christopher Smart

Jesus' words are slightly less shocking when you consider that exclusive claims to truth are more common than we know. Truth is, by its nature, exclusive. Two differing claims cannot both be right. Math teachers make exclusive claims all the time. They will tell you that the multiplication table is not up for negotiation. There are right answers and wrong ones. A doctor's prescription is an exclusive claim as well. It excludes every medication except the one that is written on the prescription paper. A person who gives you their phone number is telling you to exclude dialing all other numbers except the digits they have provided you. ~ Jon Morrison

monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over ~ Yuval Noah Harari

When it comes to ideas - and religions are, among other things, ideas - there is no right not to be offended ... In fact, if you need laws ... to protect your faith, maybe your faith is weak. ~ Katha Pollitt

Interesting Avil, the priests and the acolytes of the various religions and temples of Torea build their whole lives on a lie. At first, as children they believe it. Maybe as they grow older and more wise they see the absurdness of their beliefs, but by that time they have invested time and emotional energy into those beliefs, then seeing them crumble and fall apart would be too hard for them to bear. So the protect the lie, they shore it up with more lies and they ebb out their short lives, knowing what they preach is untrue, but preaching it all the same ... Almost as if preaching it hard enough will make it true ... Are they trying to convince their congregation? Or themselves? You are wiser than you look Avil. ~ Martyn Stanley

What is the difference between the Christian God, and the gods of the other religions?" He simply, yet profoundly answered, "The main difference is this: The God of Christianity exists. ~ R.C. Sproul

In Islam religion and politics cannot be separated. Unlike other religions, Islam is political by its very nature. ~ Ali Sina

I have seen people paralyze their entire existence around that greatest of mysteries, shaping their every movement, their every word, in a desperate attempt to find the answers to the unanswerable. They fool themselves, either through their interpretations of ancient texts or through some obscure sign from a natural event, into believing that they have found the ultimate truth, and thus, if they behave accordingly concerning that truth, they will surely be rewarded in the afterlife. This must be the greatest manifestation of that fear of death, the errant belief that we can somehow shape and decorate eternity itself, that we can curtain its windows and place its furniture in accordance with our own desperate desires.

Perhaps the greatest evil I see in this existence is when supposedly holy men prey upon the basic fears of death of the common folk to take from them. 'Give to the church!' they cry. 'Only then will you find salvation!'. Even more subtle are the many religions that do not directly ask for a person's coin, but insist that anyone of goodly and godly heart who is destined for their particular description of heaven, would willingly give that coin over.

And of course, the world is ripe with 'Doomsdayers'. people who claim that the end of the world is at hand, and cry for repentance and for almost slavish dedication.

I can only look on it all and sigh, for as death is the greatest mystery, so it is the most personal of revelations. W ~ R.A. Salvatore

The Art of Peace is the religion that is not a religion; it perfects and completes all religions. ~ Morihei Ueshiba

The idea of good and evil has thus nothing to do with religion or a mystic conscience. It is a natural need of animal races. And when founders of religions, philosophers, and moralists tell us of divine or metaphysical entities, they are only recasting what each ant, each sparrow practices in its little society. Is this useful to society? Then it is good. Is this hurtful? Then it is bad. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions ... they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religions traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. ~ Krista Tippett

The tall blue spruce trees surrounding the church stood like ancient prophets in white gowns and a peregrine falcon that had taken up residence in the belfry perched on a ledge keeping an eye out for wandering mice. ~ Kathleen Valentine

It is extremely difficult for believers, if not impossible, to draw a clear line between the facts and fantasies of their beliefs. Most often they are raised as children in the cradle of faith and, before they ever become capable of judging the truth or falsehood of their beliefs, they already become an integral part of their system. The few who awaken from their mental state of lethargy and oblivion do so at the cost of their religion but seldom admit this fact publicly. They keep wearing the same garb under the same title so that despite the loss of faith their religion continues to survive merely as a symbol of identity. This, unfortunately, is the fate of all religions which deny rationality any instrumental role in judging the validity of their beliefs. ~ Mirza Tahir Ahmad

Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one. ~ Shane Claiborne

It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself ... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few. ~ Walter Pater

Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host. ~ Frank Herbert

Prophets often foretold destruction and sometimes the destruction did not come, yet this did not disprove their divine mission, as in the case of Jonah. For God is gracious, and ready to turn away his wrath from those who turn away from their sins. But the prophet who prophesied peace and prosperity absolutely and unconditionally without adding the necessary proviso, that they do not by willful sin put a bar in their own door and stop the coming of God's favors, will be proved a true prophet only by the accomplishment of his prediction. ~ Matthew Henry

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now - the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don't last long - they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. ~ Thomas Pynchon

In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination - the zone of unquestioning certitude - sped by a common impetus that licences each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted. The zealot is one that creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community. ~ Wole Soyinka

Non-Dualism is the future of all Religions. ~ Abhijit Naskar

there is an inner core common to all religions: the universal teachings of morality and charity, of a disciplined and pure mind full of love, compassion, goodwill and tolerance. ~ S.N. Goenka

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely - a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant - which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer."

Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-det ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If your religion requires, as an article of faith, to hate people of other religions and faiths, you and your ism are screwed up, mate. ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too. ~ Lisa Randall

If God really became incarnate, and if His Incarnation can with justice compel man to change his life,then we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time ... What happens in the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist is something for which all religions of mankind have exressed longing, dimly sensed was coming, and as a rule even prefigured- the physical presence of the divine Logos made man, and the presence of his sacrificial death, in the midst of the congregation celebrating the mysteries. ~ Josef Pieper

The Divine Law was revealed to Moses, not only through the Commands that were found written in the Bible, but also through all the later rules and regulations of post-exilic days. These additional laws it was presumed were handed down orally from Moses to Joshua, thence to the Prophets, and later still transmitted to the Scribes, and eventually to the Rabbis. ~ Maurice H. Harris

In earlier religions the spirit of the time was expressed through the individual and confirmed by miracles. In modern religions the spirit is expressed through the many and confirmed by reason. ~ Heinrich Heine

Part of me hates that you know me so well."
"And the other part?"
Prophet gave a faint grin, then said quietly, "Loves it," like if he said it too loudly, fate might swoop in and snatch this moment, the word, out from under them.
Tom stilled. He didn't need the words, never really had. Like Prophet, he valued actions, but to actually hear that one word out of Prophet's mouth ... it was all Tom needed. ~ S.E. Jakes

Though I believe in God, I don't believe in religion for everybody. Some people who are a little weak and don't want to shoulder any responsibility need Catholicism. For people at the other extreme, there is Christian Science ... I think a powerful conscience is worth all the religions put together. ~ Preston Sturges

It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform. ~ C.S. Lewis