All Quotes By Tag: Religion

“The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.”

“Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: ‘If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world’s wretchedness would rend my heart.”

“I’ve always privately suspected that Jesus is in favor of revolutionaries, seeing as how he was a bit of one himself.”

“I have always considered myself a person with a gypsy heart, and I Surrender my dreams to my soul, for it’s a free sprit who believes in no boundaries of region and religion.”

“Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?”

“The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present.The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction.It is much greater. It is a work of art.It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral. It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men. Not animals, not gods. It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men – Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself – to lie, so that a greater truth may be served.It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress.But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing.And doing is life. Doing is karma.Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man. You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known.The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man.Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster.The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro.In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles.It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives. Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.”

“من أراد صفاء قلبه فليؤثر الله على شهوته، إذ القلوب المتعلقة بالشهوات محجوبة عن الله تعالى بقدر تعلقها. القلوب آنية الله في أرضه، فأحبها إليه أرقها وأصلبها وأصفاها، وإذا غذي القلب بالتذكر وسقي بالتفكر ونقي من الدغل رأى العجائب وألهم الحكمة ..”

“ أخرج الله سبحانه الأبوين من الجنة بذنب واحد ارتكباه, وخالفا فيه نهيه.ولعن إبليس, وطرده, وأخرجه من ملكوت السماء بذنب ارتكبه, وخالف فيه أمره.ونحن معاشر الحمقى_ كما قيل_ : نصل الذنوب إلى الذنوب ونرتجي**درك الجنان لدى النعيم الخالد ..ولقد علمنا أخرج الأبوين من** ملكوتها الأعلى بذنب واحد ”

“I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.”

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”

“It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It’s pure biology.”

“God is perceived by the heart, not by your reason. But what is reason? Your heart simplifying God’s guidance to fit your own needs.”

“Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That’s the truth – what is, what was, what will be – not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.”

“Faith is the surrender of the mind, it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It’s our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. … Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated”

“I believe that life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.”