Quotes to inspire and reflect

Gout is not relieved by a fine shoe nor a hangnail by a costly ring nor migraine by a tiara.

Peace is a great goal, but it is not a panacea. Neither is material wealth.

The remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love.

Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of.

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Let us meet four times a year in a grand temple with music, and thank God for all his gifts. There is one sun. There is one God. Let us have one religion. Then all mankind will be brethren.

Just because I don’t harass it like some peoples us know.don’t mean I ain't got religion.

Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one’s fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling,... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.

Religions which have any very strong hold over men’s actions have generally some instinctive basis.

Religion blushing, veils her sacred fires, / And unawares Morality expires.

You corrupt religion either in favour of your friends, or against your enemies.

Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it, if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.

In the' long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious^wars.

Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.

Religion indeed enlightens, terrifies, subdues; it gives faith, it inflicts remorse, it inspires resolutions, it draws tears, it inflames devotion, but only for the occasion.

True religion is slow in growth, and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgement; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself: it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.

Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.

In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretences to both.

Religion is the best armour in the world, but the worst cloak.

Nature teaches us to love our friends, but religion our enemies.

What is god, what is not god, what is between man / and god, who shall say?

Men make their choice: one man honors one God, / and one another.

The test of a religion or philosophy is the number of things it can explain.

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training,—religion of character is so apt to be invaded.

The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

I am no Platonist, I am nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other.

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day.

The true laws of God are the laws of our own wellbeing.

Religion, n. A daughter of Flope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature,—a piece of impertinent correspondency,—an odious approximation,—a haunting conscience,—a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.