23 Quotes On God And Religion From Famous Thinkers
Some of them preferred not to have faith because of the crooked world order, some chose to deny religion as a result of their thought system, rationality and scientific studies of their own. They expressed these ideas in their books, novels, in daily discussions with ordinary people, or in interviews... What make these statements striking, probably, are their deep concern for what religion or god means for the majority of people, and how misleading they can be. Well, here are 23 quotes from famous philosophers, scientists and novelists on religion and faith...
1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“As for me, I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man'
2. Aristotle
“Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life.”
3. D.H. Lawrence
“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.”
4. Edward Abbey
'Whatever we cannot understand easily we call God; this saves wear and tear on the brain tissues.'
5. Graham Greene
“Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.”
6. Ernest Hemingway
'All thinking men are atheists.'
7. Stephen Henry Roberts
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours”
8. Napoléon Bonaparte
'Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.'
9. Ralph Waldo Emerson
“An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel.”
10. Albert Einstein
“(Religious thought is) an attempt to find an out where there is no door.'
11. Charles Caleb Colton
'Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.”
12. Thomas Jefferson
“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg...'
13. George Bernard Shaw
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
14. Carl Sagan
'You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.”
15. Bertrand Russell
'I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism - both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true.'
16. Arthur Schopenhauer
'All religions promise a reward for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.”
17. John Burroughs
'Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.'
18. Dan Barker
“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
19. Seneca the Younger
'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful'
20. Michel de Montaigne
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known.”
21. Percy Bysshe Shelley
'If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction.'
22. Umberto Eco
“Fear prophets, also, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
23. Sean O'Casey
“What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.”
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