All Quotes By Tag: Religion

“Be courageous and He shall strengthen your heart, all of you who hope in the Lord.”

“It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes…”

“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—’a land without a people for a people without a land’—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?”

“The purpose of the gospel is to make bad men good and good men better, and to change human nature.”

“I’m sure I am wrong about many things, although I’m not sure exactly which things I’m wrong about. I’m even sure I’m wrong about what I think I’m right about in at least some cases.”

“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”

“The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it.”

“Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.”

“I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death… . I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter–the Eternity they have entered–where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness.”

“Those who feel guilty contemplating “betraying” the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the “eternal” tradition introduced to them in their youth—is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.”

“The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.”

“I open my heart to her and lay it on the table.”

“A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the ‘standpoint of art’ can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology… gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a ‘secular saviour’ for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.”

“Religion can only do two things for mankind; turn them into monster or stupid.”

“Creators aren’t gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It’s men that make gods. This explains a lot.”