Religious Childhood Quotes

As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it. ~ Patricia Lockwood

My parents were lenient. My mother believed God was another word for nature. I took up Satanism not out of desperation, but out of logic. I rebelled, not but because of a religious or repressive childhood. I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

A moment of silence is not inherently religious. ~ Sandra Day O'Connor

The moral and religious system which Jesus Christ transmitted to us is the best the world has ever seen, or can see. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains. ~ Bill Bryson

The essence of a mature human being in religious terms is the ability to see, to be aware of others' suffering and to be touched by it. ~ Megan McKenna

Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one's own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding their identity; of inner battles for survival; or other images of anger, conflict, and violence. P13 ~ Marlene Steinberg

[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are. ~ Jim Henson

Marxism is now a world faith and must be allowed to enter into a continuous dialogue with other world faiths, including religious faiths ~ Tony Benn

Religious belief is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness. ~ Dalai Lama

If God is sovereign, then it is impossible for civil government to be neutral on issues of law. All law is based in some religious code. ~ Randall Terry

My mother and my father both, you know, the term would be, 'suck it up and just get on with it'; 'don't let bad things that happen to you stop you'; 'you're in control of your life,'" recalls Bloomberg. That advice is one of his sharpest childhood memories. ~ Joyce Purnick

I had dinner with my father last night, and made a classic Freudian slip. I meant to say, "Please pass the salt," but it came out, "You prick, you ruined my childhood. ~ Jonathan Ned Katz

The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy. ~ Angela Carter

Rage swept over her at being young, young and little, as if some evil fairy had put that spell on her. Why must you be locked up in this dreadful cage of childhood for twenty or a hundred years? Nothing in life was possible unless you were old and rich, until then you were only small and futile before your tormentors, desperately waiting for the release that only years could bring. ~ Dawn Powell

Probably the first time I left Italy was to travel by train to Lourdes. I went with my mother and my grandmother - who was a very religious person - so it was a pilgrimage of sorts. I remember it as a very intense, but beautiful experience. ~ Andrea Bocelli

My mom was very religious. She might have let me buy records, but I assumed that she wouldn't. ~ Leon Bridges

When you have a childhood dream that still burns and tugs at your heart when you're an adult, you owe it to yourself to pursue and achieve this dream. ~ Robert Cheeke

The initiation with its various tortures lasted about a week, and I cheerfully accepted penances which, if they were imposed in a monastery, for a supernatural motive, and for some real reason, instead of for no reason at all, would cause such an uproar that all religious houses would be closed and the Catholic Church would probably have a hard time staying in the country. ~ Thomas Merton

They all watched Devin run up to meet the other girls. For a moment Kate felt indescribably sad, because she couldn't go with Devin back to her childhood. She could only stand here as an adult as the distance became greater and greater until, finally, there was an ocean between them. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

I celebrate everyone's religious holidays. if it's good enough for the righteous, it's good enough for the self-righteous, I always say. ~ Bette Midler

What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, ~ Sara Miles

Her mind, shaped so long before my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the behaviour of the girls of the little gang along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, tamed and subdued by good manners, by respect for intellectual values, the energy and charm of a cruel little girl from one of the noble families around Combray, who from her childhood had ridden horses, sadistically tormented cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, while remaining a paragon of virtue, might equally well have been, some years back now, and so much did she share his dashing style, the most glamorous mistress of the Prince de Sagan. ~ Marcel Proust

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class. ~ Max Weber

There is hope in forgiveness ~ John Piper

I'm sure I had low-level scurvy all of my childhood. ~ Aisha Tyler

In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion. ~ Robert McKee

Love revealed, love laid down, love spent. ~ Irish Jesuits

He turned one of his death rays into an ice cream maker, except he said I shouldn't eat too much of it at once."
I nodded slowly. "Right," I said. "That's ... sweet, I think. ~ Acacia Ackles

I had a very spoilt childhood. Not that my family were incredibly wealthy, but we lived on the beautiful island of Hawaii where everything was lush and in abundance. ~ Marie Helvin

God is not grieved because of "all the homosexuals." Not in the very least. That's religious people you're thinking of. If God is grieved it's because the beautiful, incomparable message of redemption and grace, the sweet peace of a loving relationship, has been truncated, rerouted into a message of behavior-modification and sin-management. For ~ Susan Cottrell

Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is a realizable historical system which may one day be instituted in the world. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

Religious ceremonial nowadays provides less opportunity for bad language and sexual symbolism. ~ Aubrey De Selincourt

Unfortunately, we cannot live our lives according to the moral and religious convictions or petrified dogmas of our forebears. We have an obligation to live by our own faith, forever renewing the traditions of the past and adapting them to the demands of own time and place. ~ Farquhar McHarg

Never underestimate the power of prayer! There is nothing that is impossible to God. Our Lord can heal the sick and work situations out in our life that seem overwhelming to us. In fact, He already knows what you are going to pray for even before you pray. He‟s just waiting to hear from you. ~ Kimberly McRae

I didn't have a childhood. ~ Pat Morita

John Lewis said, You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don't have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being. From time to time, we would discuss that, if you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person. Years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don't give up. You never give up on anyone. ~ Krista Tippett

We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries. ~ Thomas Jefferson

To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas. ~ Brock Chisholm

Each of us can discuss God inasmuch as he has known the grace of the Holy Spirit; for how can we think of or discuss what we haven't seen, or haven't head of, or don't know? The saints say that they have seen God, but there are people who say that there is no God. Clearly, they say this because they haven't known God, but this does not at all mean that He is not. The saints speak of that which they have truly seen and know. ~ Silouan The Athonite

The moment you exchange spontaneity with rules you've lost the edge of romance ~ Francois Du Toit