World Religions Quotes

Any minority's right to be different must be respected, but the right of the majority must not be questioned. Without the values at the core of Christianity and other world religions, without moral norms that have been shaped over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. ~ Vladimir Putin

One key and defining attribute of God that does not appear in any other world religion or system is the biblical use of the term "Father." Over 70 times in the New Testament alone, God is described as "Father" to His children. No major world religion describes the relationship between its creator and its adherents in terms of a father. ~ Ergun Caner

There is something so tough about grace, though, that some people refuse to accept it. Other world religions or worldviews make ladders we need to climb to get to heaven, when the real Christian faith can only be lived by army crawling to get it. We have to get low. We have to humble ourselves. And I promise joy is on the other side. ~ Jefferson Bethke

The universal elements are integrity, vision, discipline, passion, governed by conscience. Conscience has been educated through studying and pondering the universal, timeless principles of all six major world religions. ~ Stephen Covey

It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of them can be true. ~ Bertrand Russell

I don't think the biggest threat to our theology is humanism or the host of world religions. Our biggest threat is cut-and-paste Christianity. If man places his faith in a god he has recreated in his own image, has he placed his faith in God at all? And if not, how can such a man be saved? ~ Beth Moore

Religious people are forced to perform mental gymnastics to reconcile real life with their delusions. When Christianity, Islam and the rest of the world religions finally have gone the way of Zeus, they will leave behind a legacy of case studies for students of abnormal psychology. ~ Al Stefanelli

I love religion and have contemplated going back to school to get a world religion degree. ~ Jada Pinkett Smith

In the Middle East, Iraq , Sudan , the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, and many other places in the world , religion has been so divisive that people have killed one another, believing they were doing the work of God . ~ John C. Danforth

To the other nations of the world, religion is one among the many occupations of life. There is politics, there are the enjoyments of social life, there is all that wealth can buy or power can bring, there is all that the senses can enjoy; and among all these various occupations of life and all this searching after something which can give yet a little more whetting to the cloyed senses - among all these, there is perhaps a little bit of religion. But here, in India, religion is the one and the only occupation of life. ~ Swami Vivekananda

There will be peace on earth when there is peace among the world religions. ~ Hans Kung

Forming a new world religion is difficult and not particularly desirable. However, in that love is essential to all religions, one could speak of the universal religion of love. ~ Dalai Lama

Many of the great world religions teach that God demands a particular faith and form of worship. It should not be surprising that SOME of the people who take these teachings seriously should sincerely regard these divine commands as incomparably more important than any merely secular virtues like tolerance or compassion or reason.
Across Asia and Africa the forces of religious enthusiasm are gathering strength, and reasom and tolerance are not safe even in the secular states of the West. The historian Huge Trevor-Roper has said that it was the spread of the spirit of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ended the burning pf the witches in Europe. We may need to rely again on the influence of science to preserve a sane wolrd.It's not the certainty of the scientific knowledge that fits it for this role, but its UNCERTAINTY. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about the matters that can be studied directly in laboratory experiments, how can one take seriously the claims of religious traditions or sacred writings to certain knowledge about matters beyond human experience ~ Steven Weinberg

Every major world religion has identified marriage as between a man and a woman. ~ Barack Obama

The resurrection is not merely important to the historic Christian faith; without it, there would be no Christianity. It is the singular doctrine that elevates Christianity above all other world religions. ~ Adrian Rogers

I met evil and discovered God. I call it my discovery, but of course, it's nothing new, and it's not mine. Everyone has to make it for himself. People use different language to describe it. I suppose all the great world religions began with individuals making inspired contact with a spiritual reality and then trying to keep that knowledge alive. Most of it gets lost in rules and practices and addiction to power. That's how religions are. In the end though it hardly matters how you describe it once the essential truth has been grasped – that we have within us an infinite resource, a potential for a higher state of being, a goodness . . .' I had heard this before, in one form or another, from a spiritually inclined headmaster, a dissident vicar, an old girlfriend returning from India, from Californian professionals, and dazed hippies. ~ Ian McEwan

It was this same Jesus, the Christ who, among many other remarkable things, said and repeated something which, proceeding from any other being would have condemned him at once as either a bloated egotist or a dangerously unbalanced person ... when He said He himself would rise again from the dead, the third day after He was crucified, He said something that only a fool would dare say, if he expected longer the devotion of any disciples-unless He was sure He was going to rise. No founder of any world religion known to men ever dared say a thing like that! ~ Wilbur Smith

What sort of man is this, who over and over again, gave numerous details about His death, months before it occurred, and added to each such utterance that on the third day after His decease He would rise again from the dead - and DID RISE, as even the city of Jerusalem soon came to believe? No other founder of a great world religion (or a small one) ever made such statements, or ever came forth from the dead. ~ Wilbur Moorehead Smith

It is essential for world peace that the world religions make peace with each other. If they don't, we can hardly expect the nations of the world to lay down their arms. ~ Thomas Keating

Abraham is such a fascinating figure. Three world religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - all claim him as a patriarch. He was raised in a religious home. And yet he rejected religion in order to pursue a personal relationship with God. ~ Anne Graham Lotz

Theology is a study of the series of disagreements that are the world's religions. Atheism fundamentally disagrees with these disagreements that preceded it. ~ Stewart Stafford

Rather, I have long contended that Islam is unique among the major world religions in having a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system mandating warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers. There is no orthodox sect or school of Islam that teaches that Muslims must coexist peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis. I use the term "radical Islam" merely to distinguish those Muslims who are actively working to advance this subjugation from the many millions who are not, as well as to emphasize that the stealth jihad program is truly radical: it aims at nothing less than the transformation of American society and the imposition of Islamic law here, subjugating women and non-Muslims to the status of legal inferiors. ~ Robert Spencer

I'm not sure if that answers the question and I have absolutely no problem with any major world religion on Earth. ~ John Hodgman

Yes, a general principle that comes out of research behind Good to Eat is that there are no world religions that have acted to decrease the potential for the nutritional well-being of their followers. ~ Marvin Harris

The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up. ~ Richard Rohr

When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion ~ Anthony Storr

The striking discoveries of contemporary science are continually telling us new things about how material creation came to be and how it continues to evolve. Although we do not have all the answers, we are clearly going in a direction that transcends the cosmology in which the great world religions came into existence. Our vision, understanding, and our attitudes about God inevitably must change. ~ Thomas Keating

The founders of the great world religions, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Lao-Tzu, Mohammed, all seem to have striven for a worldwide brotherhood of man; but none of them could develop institutions which would include the enemy, the unbeliever. ~ Geoffrey Gorer

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way. ~ Salman Rushdie

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

When considering the topic of spirituality or religion, I would encourage you to look at Christianity first. It is a testable religion. That is, it is based on evidence. The evidence is philosophical and historical. It can be examined and then we can all make our decision. ~ Jon Morrison

The principle of fasting is taught in almost all major world religions as a means of developing a higher level of self-mastery and self-control, and also a deeper awareness of how really dependent we are. ~ Stephen Covey

The character of the Open Conspiracy [the movement towards a world collective] will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as widespread and evident as socialism or communism. It will largely have taken the place of these movements. It will be more, it will be a world religion. ~ H.G.Wells

Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people. ~ Jon Stewart

Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of women. ~ Karen Armstrong

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

In the doctrine of the Trinity," wrote Herman Bavinck, "beats the heart of the whole revelation of God for the redemption of humanity." As the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, "our God is above us, before us, and within us." The doctrine of the Trinity - God as one in essence and three in person - shapes and structures Christian faith and practice in every way, distinguishing it from all world religions. ~ Michael S. Horton

Christianity is the only world religion whose primary source documents are in a language other than the language of the founder of the religion. This is unheard of among world religions. Muhammad spoke Arabic, and the Qur'an is in Arabic; the Brahmin priests in India spoke Sanskrit, and the Upanishads are in Sanskrit. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and yet the primary documents that record Christ's teachings are not in Aramaic but in Koine Greek, the language of Gentile Hellenism. ~ Timothy Tennent

Comma in 'Beginning with a Comma' is the hiccup, not only a pause. One can never imagine where a breath pauses, where adolescence can get acquainted with adulthood, its shadow lines, blurred realities that make the appearance and likeliness a mere binary to each other! Comma is a mental conflict, therefore, I call it a hiccup, an 'uncomfortable' pause- one that either continues till you gulp down something else or vanishes forever, miraculous!
Gita, Crusades, Khalsa or Jihad- War has never been alien to world religions. But it is not the physical combat these wars symbolise, but the inner conflicts. In Gita, while Arjuna symbolizes a person who seeks salvation, Krishna is the God himself and it is the mental conflict which is Kurukshetra.

Epilogue, Beginning with a Comma ~ Amrit Sinha

Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions. ~ Anthony Storr

When you want something," says Michael, "it's like admitting that your life has a hole in it."
"And to fill that hole, you need something that you don't have and you might not get."
Michael gives a little laugh. "I never thought of it like that."
I recall a lesson from our world religions class. "Didn't the Buddha say that want ing is what makes people suffer?"
"The Buddha didn't play baseball," says Michael.
"If he did, maybe he'd think that wanting isn't such a bad thing."
Michael nods. "In some ways, I think that wanting is an act of courage. ~ Paul Acampora

We must move as quickly as possible to a one-world government; a one-world religion; under a one world leader. ~ Robert Mueller

All the major world religions (always excluding animism, of course), are founded on these notions: that man and man alone was the desired object of creation, that man occupies a preeminent place in the order of creation, that man has a value in God's eyes that is transcendently greater than that of all other creatures, that this world of matter is illusory, transitory, and worthless. ~ Daniel Quinn

If the Bible is only human lore, and not divine truth, then we have no real answer to those who say, Let's pick the best out of all religions and blend it all into Pan-Deism - one world religion with one god made out of many. ~ J. Sidlow Baxter

The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world." ~ Joseph Campbell

Who is considered as reputable in God's language? The one who can do 'world's salvation' just through his eyes! ~ Dada Bhagwan

this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ..."~~Barack Obama upon winning the Democratic nomination for presidency conveys his thinking of what that means ....for the world, Tuesday, JUNE 03, 2008 ~ Barack Obama

Mind over matter represents the triumph of will over physical hindrance. Our thoughts are our weapon against the world. ~ David Adam

At the end of World War II, we had wage and price controls. Under wartime inflationary conditions, many employers found it difficult to recruit employees. To get around the limitations of wage control, many began to offer health care as a fringe benefit to attract workers. As a new benefit, it took some years for the Internal Revenue Service to get around to requiring the cost of the medical care to be included in the reported taxable income of the employees. By the time it did, workers had come to regard nontaxable medical care provided by the employer as a right - or should I say entitlement? They raised such a big political fuss that Congress legislated nontaxable status for employer-provided medical care. ~ Milton Friedman

The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world. ~ Kim Hyesoon

He was amazed to find that the Karmapa, an eminent spiritual leader known the world over, treated him as though his visit were one of the most important things that had ever happened to the Karmapa in his life. This treatment did not manifest through grandiose gestures or ceremony, but rather through the simplicity and completeness of the Karmapa's presence, which offered my friend an experience of being completely loved. When I heard this story, I thought about how many conversations I have had during which my attention was halfhearted. I might be thinking about the next thing I had to do or the next person I had to talk to. How unfair that lack of attention now seems! The simple act of being completely present to another person is truly an act of love - no drama is required. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Cinema is a world of imagination. ~ Marjane Satrapi

Our present world contains clues ... to another world-a world which we can begin to experience now, but will only know in all its fullness at the end of things. ~ Alister E. McGrath

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise. ~ Montesquieu

All of us have schnozzles ... if not in our faces, then in our character, minds or habits. When we admit our schnozzles, instead of defending them, we begin to laugh, and the world laughs with us. ~ Jimmy Durante

I have often found that no matter where I meet people in the world, there is a path that leads back to Queen's. ~ Liam Neeson

Central to Möser's view of the human world was "honor," a notion that was as important to corporatist society as the notion of dignity would be for the more individualistic society that succeeded it. In Möser's view, a person acquired his identity from his place in the institutional structure of society, a society in which economic, social, and political institutions were not distinguished from one another. His status (as a guildsman, noble landowner, serf, or independent peasant cottager) determined not only how he earned his living, but his sense of who he was, of what his duties and obligations were, of those to whom he ought to defer and those who ought to defer to him. (In the language of modern sociology, Möser's society was one in which almost all of the individual's roles derived from a single status.) Who one was was largely a continuation of what one's forebears had been. For Möser the real self was the socially encumbered self, the self based on status, on historical and regional particularity, and on property. It was a self whose prime virtue was honor. Status and the honor that attached to it were inherited, although they could be lost if one failed to live up to the duties of one's rank. ~ Jerry Z. Muller

I've wanted to see beyond the Western, mechanical view of the world and see what else might appear when the lens was changed. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Rather we let down the world than the world let us down! ~ Cao Cao

In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them. ~ Pat Conroy

People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshiped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; ~ Ayn Rand

Someday the Chicago Cubs are going to be in the World Series ~ Harry Caray

I am the goddess of the Mist," Hecate explained. "I am responsible for keeping the veil that separates the world of the gods from ~ Rick Riordan

I am not a fairy godmother or anything of that sort, but I hope to give you a happy home and a good education, and to send you out into the world true, brave, generous men, prepared to serve God truly all the days of your life."
~Aunt Persis ~ Constance Savery

There is always magic to be summoned at any point. I love to live in a world of magic, but not a fake world of magic. We all really basically have a lot of magic ... It's only those of us who choose to accept it, that really understand it. It's there for everyone. That's the only thing that I feel I am able to give to people and that's why I know that they respond to me because I try to give them only their own magic ... not mine, but theirs ~ Stevie Nicks

I love working with male actors, and I think there's a tendency to write really interesting characters that would work solely alongside men where they would be in a man's world and have to deal with that, and it creates a lot of interesting storylines. For me, it's kind of circumstantial, but I definitely enjoy it. ~ Elisabeth Moss

Now that the day is almost done, the world of glass recedes, the butterfly threat diminishes. I imagine that we're both here in this bed, that my invisible body is nestled against hers. We are breathing at the same pace, our chests rising and falling in unison. We have no need to whisper, because at this distance, all we need is thought. Our eyes close at the same time. We feel the same sheets against us, the same night. Our breath slows together. We split into different versions of the same dreams. Sleep takes us at the exact same time. ~ David Levithan

What point is there in dying in a ward, listening to the moans and rasps of the terminally ill? Wouldn't it be better to spend the twenty-seven thousand on a banquet, then, after taking poison, depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by intoxicated beautiful women and dashing friends? ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

The deepest reason why the Church is weak and the world is dying is that there are not enough saints. No, that's not quite honest. The reason is that WE are not saints. ~ Peter Kreeft

I don't think of the ashram world as being any more spiritual than the corporate world. ~ Karan Bajaj

He said that that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. ~ Cormac McCarthy

The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others. ~ Isaiah Berlin

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part. ~ Lionel Shriver

Everything that occurs in the world, in every epoch, has something that corresponds to it in ancient times. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

He was the last person in the world she wanted to get away from. ~ Kimberly Derting

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
There is joy and also pain
but the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Pretty-plain, loony-sane
The ways of the world all will change and all the ways remain the same
but if you're mad or only sane
the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
We walk in love but fly in chains
And the planes in Spain fall mainly in the rain. ~ Stephen King

The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it'... that manifesto is doubted now, ladies and gentlemen... almost everywhere in our culture, in all walks of life, among the young and the old, but especially among the young, for whom the dream of a glittering future in which life will become ever sweeter and sweeter and sweeter, decade after decade, century after century, has been exploded and is meaningless. Your children know better. They know better in large part because you know better.

Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. They must, as a professional obligation, still affirm and proclaim the manifesto of our revolution. If they want to hold on to their jobs, they assure us with absolute conviction that a glorious future lies just ahead for us - provided that we march forward under the banner of conquest and rule. They assure us of this, and then they wonder, year after year, why fewer and fewer voters go to the poles. ~ Daniel Quinn

I'd like to be everybody in the world' I said. 'I'd like to live a million times.'
'Well'
and here my father gave one of his sagely nods
'that would be a fine piece of magic, wouldn't it? ~ Robert McCammon