Religion Quotes
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Martyrdoms would rarely lead to conversions because they were themselves relatively rare.
The vast majority of pagans—including the millions who eventually converted—never saw a martyrdom, as recent scholarship has shown.
As the most prolific and one of the best-traveled authors of the first three Christian centuries, Origen of Alexandria, stated in no uncertain terms: “Only a small number of people, easily counted, have died for the Christian religion.
Bart Ehrman
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All the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.
Beryl Markham
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Conversion without a clean heart is a denial of God and religion.
Mahatma Gandhi
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The ways in which theological constructs pose questions about what it is to be a human being on this earth are deeply elegant and deeply interesting to me. I may not always agree with the answers religion offers, but I take great interest in the questions it poses.
Ayana Mathis
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Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.
Barack Obama
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If we would gain light either on the theory or the practice of religion: i. We must sincerely desire the light. 2. We must use the light we already have. 3. We must patiently seek light in the double way of prayer and rational inquiry. Never, as long as the world stands, will any religiously benighted soul thus patiently desire and pray and labor for the break of day, without at last seeing the eyelids of the morn unsealed, and the painfully dusky east gradually redden into the sun.
Enoch Fitch Burr
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“The late proceedings of those daring invaders to establish a national religion have opened the eyes of all lovers of liberty and religion... I have been told they have thrown off the mask and are preaching to the people to elect none but godly men to represent them in the General and State Legislatures; ... what they mean by godly people, is people of their own stamp...”
Anne Royall
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Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
Victor Hugo
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A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman.
Max Lerner
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Pity on the person who has become accustomed to seeing in necessity something arbitrary, who ascribes to the arbitrary some sort of reason, and even claims that following that sort of reason has religious value.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.
Bernd Heinrich
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The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.
John Stuart Mill
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All who contribute to the overthrow of religion, or to the ruin of kingdoms and commonwealths, all who are foes to letters and to the arts which confer honour and benefit on the human race (among whom I reckon the impious, the cruel, the ignorant, the indolent, the base and the worthless), are held in infamy and detestation.
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
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The new religion without any secrets is philosophy. The old religion, said Aristotle, is necessary only for the uneducated; Confucius, Buddha, Voltaire and Lessing were of the same opinion.
Artur Phleps
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What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!
William Blake