Faith, Spirituality and Religion

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing.

Serving God is doing good to man. But praying is thought an easier service and is therefore more generally chosen.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.

I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who when danger is pressing in will not acknowledge the divine power.

The truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing.

The soul takes flight to the world that is invisible but there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.

The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.

The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

The love, more especially, which is concerned with the good, and which is perfected in company with temperance and justice, whether among gods or men, has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods who are above us, and with one another.

Take a look around, then, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening. Now by the uninitiated I mean the people who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their hands, and who will not allow that action or generation or anything invisible can have real existence.

Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine. A man who uses reminders of these things correctly is always at the highest, most perfect level of initiation, and he is the only one who is perfect as perfect can be. He stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine; ordinary people think he is disturbed and rebuke him for this, unaware that he is possessed by god.

No one ever dies an atheist.

Men say that we ought not to enquire into the supreme God and the nature of the universe, nor busy ourselves in searching out the causes of things, and that such enquiries are impious; whereas the very opposite is the truth.

Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.

‎ Love is a madness produced by an unclassifiable rational desire to understand the ultimate truth about the world.

I have good hope that there is something after death.

Hope,' he says, 'cherishes the soul of him who lives justice and holiness, and is the nurse of his age and the companion of his journey; hope which is mightiest to sway the restless soul of man.

He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him

God is the cause only of good.

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

Atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of understanding.