Nonreligious Quotes & Sayings

Some nonreligious people are disgruntled by the word "faith," feeling that it has no connection to them. But we all have faith. Broadly speaking, "faith" does not apply only to belief in the supernatural. We have faith in our life, for example, believing we will live to see tomorrow, or in our health, believing we have years of healthy life ahead of us. Husbands and wives, parents and children have faith in one another. — Kentetsu Takamori

Her way of being religious was as nonconformist as her nonreligious life had been. She was skeptical about many of the practices of the institutional church. She preferred to trust in the personal relationship she had grown to experience with God. This relationship transformed her ability to be in community and enabled her to see the essence of those around her: "The longer I live, the more I see God at work in people who don't have the slightest interest in religion and never read the Bible and wouldn't know what to do if they were persuaded to go inside a church."

For Dorothy [Day], the bread broken at Mass wasn't any more holy than the bread broken at shelters and soup kitchens. Church didn't happen in a building. It happened in the way people related to each other. Christ wasn't any more present in the liturgy than he was when on person listened with compassion to the pain of another. — Helen LaKelly Hunt

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature. — Lionel Trilling

Philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise. Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, — Ayn Rand

Another stereotype I spent a lot of time batting down: that Christians were all spittle-spewing hatemongers. I met a few of those in my travels, of course, but they struck me as a distinct minority. Wonbo and I - two nonreligious New Yorkers, one of them gay, the other gay-friendly - were never treated with anything short of respect. Often, in fact, what we found was kindness, hospitality, and curiosity. Yes, people would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it. — Dan Harris

Although it is nonreligious and nontheistic, it's difficult to present Buddhism without sounding theoretical and religious. As — Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back.
Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality — Donald Miller

Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life. — Francis Perrin

Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black. — Frans De Waal

Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that. — Frans De Waal

It is my fundamental conviction that compassion - the natural capacity of the human heart to feel concern for and connection with another human being - constitutes a basic aspect of our nature shared by all human beings, as well as being the foundation of our happiness. All ethical teachings, whether religious or nonreligious, aim to nurture this innate and precious quality, to develop it and to perfect it. — Dalai Lama

For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality - neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades. — Martin Buber

For all the venom and fear spewed at members of the 'religious right,' most of today's churches are left alone ... the nonreligious tend to look at our churches as benign institutions that create a placid and docile citizenry, having little impact on our culture. — Kay Coles James

I often write about nonreligious people, and I try to find situations where their sense of humanity is restored or discovered. I think you can be a good person in many ways. And I think you often have to be careful that prayer can seem superficial, because it's a very complicated thing to love your neighbor as yourself. — Horton Foote

More to the point: the growing universe of the Nones - the new nonreligious - is one of the most spiritually vibrant and provocative spaces in modern life. It is not a world in which spiritual life is absent. It is a world that resists religious excesses and shallows. — Krista Tippett

Our plan will not favor religious institutions over nonreligious institutions. As president, I'm interested in what is constitutional and I'm interested in what works. — George W. Bush

Eliade's most compelling point, for me, is that sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of "crypto-religious" behavior. Eliade noted that even a person committed to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others - a man's birth-place, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life. — Jonathan Haidt

The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one. — Marilynne Robinson

The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or "willingness to yield to authority," was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as "assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention." Other — Siddhartha Mukherjee

If you praise others you are considered a nice person, but if you praise yourself you are arrogant or nonreligious! What a society, eh? No wonder your self-esteem is low. — Maddy Malhotra

My own ongoing research among secular Americans-as well as that of a handful of other social scientists who have only recently turned their gaze on secular culture-confirms that nonreligious family life is replete with its own sustaining moral values and enriching ethical precepts. — Phil Zuckerman

Yes, I am a tad obsessive. For a nonreligious woman, this is my faith. — Rabih Alameddine

Secularism denounces supernaturalism and promotes a nonreligious or antireligious basis of social organization and morality. — Carl F. H. Henry

I guess I liked the idea that ... well, that there might be some kind of larger meaning to life or whatever. My mother was into that. She had a nonreligious spiritual side to her, if that makes any sense. She believed in the idea of fate and destiny. An interconnectedness and purpose in life. — Jessica Park

Our constitutional ban on religious tests for public office is worth less to the non-religious than the sheepskin parchment it was written on was worth to the sheep. — Unknown

The yoke is hard because the teachings of Jesus are radical: enemy love, unconditional forgiveness, extreme generosity. The yoke is easy because it is accessible to all - the studied and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the religious and the nonreligious. Whether we like it or not, love is available to all people everywhere to be interpreted differently, applied differently, screwed up differently, and manifested differently. — Rachel Held Evans

In working through nonreligious language to explain that journey, the idea of place became very important. Jesus says, "Here's the deal! I'll leave My place. I'll come to your place. I'll take your place. And then we'll go to My place." This simplicity captured me. Everyone understands places. We all have them. It's where we live our lives day to day. Then Jesus walks into our place and redirects us. — Mark Batterson

The spiritual-but-nonreligious movement is largely driven by charismatic authors and speakers who attract like-minded people to their workshops and intensives. — Gudjon Bergmann

I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, nonreligious man, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine; the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever. — Slavoj Zizek

The First Amendment is important not only to guarantee the rights of alternative religions and of nonreligious persons in society; it is also important in setting the only possible legal and social condition for the creative health of serious religion itself. — Langdon Brown Gilkey

Being spiritual-but-nonreligious sounds good in theory - at least it's better than attending antiquated religious institutions. We can do that. And we have. A growing number of us identify as spiritual-but-nonreligious. — Gudjon Bergmann