The purpose of all major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts. – Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. – John Updike, Self-Consciousness, 1989
A religion without the element of mystery would not be a religion at all. – Edwin Lewis
Religion is the metaphysics of the masses. – Arthur Schopenhauer
All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays. – Cathy Ladman
No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard. – William Ernest Hocking
The church is the great lost and found department. – Robert Short
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. – Thomas Merton
God made so many different kinds of people. Why would he allow only one way to serve him? – Martin Buber
All religions must be tolerated… for… every man must get to heaven his own way. – Frederick the Great
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. – Dalai Lama
If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances. – Theodore Dreiser, 1941
I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men have need of the gods. – Homer
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. – George Bernard Shaw
Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. – Seneca the Younger
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists. – G.K. Chesterton
[R]eligion cannot be given or bought, but must grow as trees grow, needing frost and snow, rain and wind to strengthen it before it is deep-rooted in the soul. – Louisa May Alcott, “Through the Mist,” Work: A Story of Experience, 1873
The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell. – Sean Ningen
