Religion God Quotes & Sayings

I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same fifty percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't ... Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe ... same as the voodoo lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same ... so just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself ... — George Carlin

I want here to make three suggestions: first, that the doubts the ordinary man feels about religion are justified, and need not be stifled or concealed; second, that there is no ground for the view that Christianity is the only alternative to communism, or that there can be no sound character training that is not based on religion; and, third, I want to make some practical suggestions to the parents who are not believers, on what they should tell the children about God, and what sort of moral training they should give them. — Margaret E. Knight

The word of God is full of assurance. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Praying is talking to God. Meditating is listening. — Christopher Moore

So it is that God tugs at a pilgrim's sleeve telling him to remember that he is only human. He must be his own man, remain in exile, and belong to himself. He must pay attention to his own feelings and to the meaning of what he does, if he is to be for himself, and yet for others as well. — Sheldon B. Kopp

God will not allow us to be overwhelmed by temptation, but with it He will provide a way of escape so that we will be able to endure it. — Rebecca Wells

Seen through the eyes of faith, religion's future is secure. As long as there are human beings, there will be religion for the sufficient reason that the self is a theomorphic creature - one whose morphe (form) is theos - God encased within it. Having been created in the imago Dei, the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them. — Huston Smith

Christians could agree or argue about God as much as we wanted, but it was all essentially chatter. What bound that driver and me together was the obvious thing, so plain and dumb between us we could almost ignore it: the rough wooden pallet of onions that organized our days. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit prisoners. We fed people. — Sara Miles

Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine. — Elizabeth Gilbert

May God continue to give us strength for our daily work. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Surrender everything to God. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Just as the soul fills the body, so God fills the world. Just as the soul bears the body, so God endures the world. Just as the soul sees but is not seen, so God sees but is not seen. Just as the soul feeds the body, so God gives food to the world. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

I believe we are more ready to embrace our lives in the here and now when we are able to recognize the continuity between the immanence of God in our world and eternity. Rather than simply waiting to be liberated to another time or place, we are being invited to collaborate in the healing and redemption of our world. — Mark Scandrette

The most dangerous type of atheism is not theoretical atheism, but practical atheism -that's the most dangerous type. And the world, even the church, is filled up with people who pay lip service to God and not life service. And there is always a danger that we will make it appear externally that we believe in God when internally we don't. We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live with our lives like he never existed. That is the ever-present danger confronting religion. That's a dangerous type of atheism. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality ... The true subject matter of religion is not our own little souls, but the Eternal God and His whole mysterious purpose, and our solemn responsibility to Him. — Evelyn Underhill

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus. — Anne Lamott

I'm not sure that religion was constructed with time travelers in mind." Buck's brows rose at that. "Constructed?" he echoed, surprised. "Who builds God? — Diana Gabaldon

How women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women. — Dalia Mogahed

Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God. — Pope Francis

Thinking of love in terms of romance is like thinking of God in terms of a priest. — Silvia Hartmann

I am seeing life in two dimensions; human and divine. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Each person is sacred, no matter what his or her culture, religion, handicap, or fragility. Each person is created in God's image; each one has a heart, a capacity to love and to be loved. — Jean Vanier

You go to church to respect God, not the priest. By not going to church, you disrespect God, not the priest.
- Don Camillo — Giovannino Guareschi

And we must - absolutely must - maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God. — Richard Rohr

For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue. — Greg Graffin

God will fulfil His promise. Wait patiently for God to act. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

False religion may prevail, iniquity may abound, the love of many may wax cold, the cross of Calvary may be lost sight of, and darkness, like the pall of death, may spread over the world; the whole force of the popular current may be formed to overthrow the people of God; but in the hour of greatest peril the God of Elijah will raise up human instrumentalities to bear a message that will not be silenced. — Ellen G. White

My mother said, "Arturo, stop that. Your sister's tired."

"Oh Holy Ghost, Oh Holy inflated triple ego, get us out of the depression. Elect Roosevelt. Keep us on the gold standard. Take France off, but for Christ's sake keep us on!"

"Arturo, stop that"

"Oh Jehovah, in your infinite mutability see if you can't scrape up some coin for the Bandini family."

My mother said, "Shame, Arturo. Shame."

I got up on the divan and yelled, "I reject the hypothesis of God! Down with the decadence of a fraudulent Christianity! Religion is the opium of the people! All that we are or ever hope to be we owe to the devil and his bootleg apples!"

My mother came after me with the broom. — John Fante

God not da faddah, he just the spoiled moody child, but you got to go t'rough him to get to da real power, his mama, Mot'er God. She da real Almighty! She run da heavens alone. Original single parent. When somethin' bad happen, usually mean she let God try his hand, and he screw up plenny. You need something important, you go directly Mot'er God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph? Dey just small potatoes, part of the chorus, neh? — Kiana Davenport

The chief danger of the 20th century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell. — William Booth

Science will always be the source of authority for those who wish to remove God from their thinking. — Curtis A. Chamberlain

The Fanaticism which discards the Scripture, under the pretense of resorting to immediate revelations is subversive of every principle of Christianity. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they may make room for their own falsehoods. — John Calvin

One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics. — Iain Banks

Christianity is the only true and perfect religion ... — Benjamin Rush

It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son. — Horatius Bonar

God resides most strongly and evidently where science has not yet progressed to go ... And if this is true then it follows that God resides everywhere and in everything. — Terryl L. Givens

I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born. — Thomas Robert Malthus

I think quite a bit of organized religion has become big business. Jesus Christ never sold the word of God. He never gave a sermon and then said, 'For $8.99, you can buy the CD.' — Ving Rhames

Many are called impious, not for having a worse, but a different religion from their neighbors; and many atheistical, not for the denying of God, but for thinking somewhat peculiarly concerning him. — Frances Wright

The Fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom, and therefore belongs to the beginnings, and is felt in the first cold hours before the dawn of civilisation; the power that comes out of the wilderness and rides on the whirlwind and breaks the gods of stone; the power before which the eastern nations are prostrate like a pavement; the power before which the primitive prophets run naked and shouting, at once proclaiming and escaping from their god; the fear that is rightly rooted in the beginnings of every religion, true or false: the fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom; but not the end. — G.K. Chesterton

Only in hindsight do we understand how God intended a problem for good. — Rick Warren

Non Violence and Religion:
Both designed to keep the oppressed from murdering their oppressors. — Darnell Lamont Walker

In order to compete with God for the dominion of the world, Satan, whom Christ called "the prince of this world," was forced to go into the "religion" business. — Billy Graham

Religion and science have nothing to do with each other, they're about different things, science is about the way the world works and religion is about miracles, I mean, if you ask most ordinary people in church or in a mosque why they believe, it's almost certainly got something to do with the belief that God does wonderful things, that God intervenes, that God heals the sick, that God answers prayers, God forgives sins. — Richard Dawkins

A church that is deeply aware of it's misery and nakedness before a holy God will cling tenaciously to an all sufficient Savior, while one that is self-confident and relatively unaware of its inherent sinfulness will reach for religion and morality whenever it seems convenient — Michael Horton

And indeed man has invented God. And the strange thing, the wonderful thing, is not that God really does exist, but that an idea like that - the idea of God's necessity - could find its way into the head of a savage and vicious animal such as man, so sacred is it, that idea, so touching, so exceedingly wise and so greatly to his honour. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I love the freedom of my wings. I love the empty space above the ground. I rejoice in my freedom. Freedom is my religion. Peace is my God. Love is my worship. — Banani Ray

One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened. — Robert M. Price

He who does not reflect his life back to God in gratitude does not know himself. — Albert Schweitzer

God's word is not just to be heard and repeated, it is to be breathed, lived, and emulated with each action. — Steve Maraboli

What about justice," he asked, "and charity, and resignation, and courage, and everything which makes the human soul to live!" Religion, he continued, "is a spirit, a movement of the heart. You make of it a power, a society, an exterior force, something which struggles with other powers and other societies. To love God and one's fellow man, is it necessary to have so much materiality?"42 — Mary McAuliffe

If you read the Scriptures, you know thy Creator and thy soul. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago - just a couple of centuries - when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world's greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements. — Bruce Sheiman

Your religion cannot be divorced from your relationships. — Jim George

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace - the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us. — George MacDonald

The Lord has filled my hands until it spilleth over; I am happy to give. — K.A. Hosein

I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen ... go wrong — George MacDonald Fraser

These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died. — James W. Loewen

A religious system is to be judged by its idea of God, for it is upon this that its whole structure rests. — John Daniel

You are confusing God with religion. It is like water. Water is water, whether you drink it from the tap, or you get it from a bottle. Sparkling or still, it is always water, irrespective of the brand or packaging. God is like water and religion is the brand or packaging. — Luke Gracias

Just because I don't believe in YOUR God doesn't mean I don't believe in God. I just choose not to be bound by the limits of your imagination or those of your ancestors. — Steve Maraboli

Make me chaste and To what excesses will men not go for the sake of a religion in which they believe so little and which they practice so imperfectly! — Jean De La Bruyere

Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing. — Elizabeth Knox

Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. — Augustine Of Hippo

God is the name given by theologians to something they know nothing about. There is no God; the whole existence is made of the stuff called love. — Osho

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. — Anonymous

While many ethnic and religious groups are mainly focused on the afterlife and downplaying this world, Jews view wealth and success as a blessing and gift from God. — H.W. Charles

Philosophy may serve as the bridge between theology and science. All atheism is a philosophy, but not all philosophy is atheism. Philosophy ('love of wisdom') is simply a tool depending on how one uses it, and in some cases, logically understanding the nature of God and existence. — Criss Jami

It is not very romantic, but reality is a better basis for building a relationship than fantasizing about a soul mate or counting on a god to find you a partner. — Darrel Ray

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place. — Philip Roth

The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances. — Kathleen Norris

People of very different opinions
friends who can discuss politics, religion, and sex with perfect civility
are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique. People who merely roll their eyes at hate crimes feel compelled to write jeremiads on declining standards when a newspaper uses the wrong form of its. Challenge my most cherished beliefs about the place of humankind in God's creation, and while I may not agree with you, I'll fight to the death for your right to say it. But dangle a participle in my presence, and I'll consider you a subliterate cretin no longer worth listening to, a menace to decent society who should be removed from the gene pool before you do any more damage. — Jack Lynch

Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither. — W. Somerset Maugham

He who defends with love will be secure; Heaven will save him, and protect him with love. — Lao-Tzu

Cha-Cha favored short, earnest prayer, and he often wondered what took others so long., It had something to do with excess supplication, he suspected. He never presented a long list of specific requests to God, had always felt uncomfortable with the presumptuousness of "Ask and you shall receive." This might have been a result of pride, or his own middling ambition, but mostly Cha-Cha's prayers were a series of thank-yous and I'm sorrys. — Angela Flournoy

We have to be ready for the blessings God tosses at us. In order to catch your blessing, you have to let go of your burden. — Raylene Roybal

Prayer is not a monologue. It speaks to God and to the community. In the last analysis, religion is not what goes on inside a soul. It is what goes on in the world, between people, between us and God. To trap faith in a monologue, and pretend that it resides solely inside the self, undermines the true interchange of all belief. — David Wolpe

You always have a place to run to, always. The place is GOD. — Armor Of God

have seen how the fear of becoming subject to God's revenge and punishment has paralyzed the mental and emotional lives of many people, independently of their age, religion, or life-style. This paralyzing fear of God is one of the great human tragedies. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

It's time we capture our imaginations for Christ — Peter E. Gillquist

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. — Richard Dawkins

People will often, almost always, prefer a male God. A male image of God gives them this sense of security, safety, order, no nonsense. So that's where their psyche is at. Probably it's something that they've got to go through. Not that there isn't a need for order in the world, but the mystical level seems to be the mature level of religion, and there the question is not order but union - divine union. And so, without some integration of the feminine, usually you never get to the mystical level. — Richard Rohr

Spirituality is conversation with God, everything else is just religious custom. — Stefan Emunds

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. — C.S. Lewis

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us. And yet - — Oscar Wilde

To achieve peace, destruction is delivered. To give the gift of freedom, one promises eternal imprisonment. Adjudication obviates the need for justice. This is a studied, deliberate embrace of diametric opposition. It is a belief in balance, a belief asserted with the conviction of religion. But in this case, the proof of a god's power lies not in the cause but in the effect. Accordingly, in this world and in all others, proof is achieved by action, and therefore all action - including the act of choosing inaction - is inherently moral. No deed stands outside the moral context. At the same time, the most morally perfect act is the one taken in opposition to what has occurred before. — Steven Erikson

It knows you.Every soul is connected to it in the same way-nobody is closer farther.Doesn't matter what your beliefs were in that life or any of them.Only the soul can create distance between itself and what you call God ... and almost every one of us does,at one time or another.Then we just have to learn how to bridge the distance and find our way home again.There are lots of different ways. — Sheri Meshal

You only need grace to allow the light and good spirit of your sacred-self to exist. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. — Albert Einstein

Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime. — Leo Tolstoy

I don't see life divided into public and private, secular and sacred. It's all an open place of service before our God. — Charles R. Swindoll

By 1998, members of the United States National Academy of Sciences, an elite elected group sponsored by the federal government, were approaching complete atheism. Only 10 percent testified to a belief in either God or immortality. Among them were a scant 2 percent of the biologists. In modern civilizations, there is no overwhelming importance in the general populace to belong to an organized religion. Witness, — Edward O. Wilson

Religion, in its most general view, is such a Sense of God in the soul, and such a conviction of our obligations to him, and of our dependence upon him, as shall engage us to make it our great care to conduct ourselves in a manner which we have reason to believe will be pleasing to him. — Philip Doddridge

But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder. — Matt Groening

Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Technically, according to the notion of the will of God, there is no such a thing as a competent surgeon. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I had always heard rumors of her, Nanook thought, she who can control the wind, the water, the earth, and fire ... she who can talk to time. But those were old myths of a woman who lived many thousands of years ago, the first daughter of the Earth. There is a prophecy that she will return again, during the end times -- every religion has someone like that, someone to wait for and put your faith in, but my culture had mostly covered up her existence. We had a god of the sea, a god of the land, a god of the air, a god of fire, but no one who could control all of the elements. We spoke, only in whispers, of the ancient bloodline -- the descendents of the Great Mother. Too many superstitious minds, too many men concerned only with their own power and position, had heard these whispers in the past and taken gruesome steps to erase the descendents. The lineage was said to be broken, the blood of the Great Mother spilled for the last time. — Sarah Warden

It is far better that we admitted a thousand devils to roam at large than that we permitted one such imposter and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible prophets, to come with the pretended word of God and have credit among us. — Thomas Paine

Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within ... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, "the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad — Huston Smith