All Quotes By Tag: Religion

“Religion and art […] are almost the same thing anyway. Just different ways of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to the emotional pitch that we can ecstasy or rapture.”

“A new religion with only one commandment: Thou shalt not tell others how to live.”

“I would rove down the hallway to the front alcove where I could see the water in the harbor float to the ocean and the ocean roll on till it sloshed against the sky. Nothing could hold a glorybound picture of it.First time I saw it, my feet hopped in place and I lifted my hand over my head and danced. That’s when I got true religion. I didn’t know to call it religion back then, didn’t know Amen from what-when, I just knew something came into me that made me feel the water belonged to me. I would say, that’s my water out there.”

“Religion is, sometimes, presented as if you don’t please God, you cannot be productive. However, it is your productivity that pleases God; He takes delight in the prosperity of His children.”

“One problem with the black man is too much emphasis on the miraculous, which indicates to them that they can circumvent principles, practices, philosophies, processes, procedures, and planning to achieve greatness. There is nothing more delusionary than that. The miraculous is a circumstantial intervention of divinity in the affairs of humanity. That Jesus multiplied bread and fish did not prevent men and women from opening bakeries and fishing the next day. The black man would have started a “Fish and Bread Multiplication” ministry. This kind of mindset makes religion an assassin of the intellect and creates a bunch of irresponsible citizenry that outsources their problems to God, when He expects them to use their brains. Problems that can be solved with our minds are outsourced to God in prayers.”

“I claim not one religion, practice or belief. I do, however, study all of them. I’m disappointed.”

“Priests discovered this principle thousands of years ago. It underlies numerous religious ceremonies and commandments. If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient. A poor peasant sacrificing a priceless bull to Jupiter will become convinced that Jupiter really exists, otherwise how can he excuse his stupidity? The peasant will sacrifice another bull, and another, and another, just so he won’t have to admit that all the previous bulls were wasted. For exactly the same reason, if I have sacrificed a child to the glory of the Italian nation, or my legs to the communist revolution, it’s enough to turn me into a zealous Italian nationalist or an enthusiastic communist. For if Italian national myths or communist propaganda are a lie, then I will be forced to admit that my child’s death or my own paralysis have been completely pointless. Few people have the stomach to admit such a thing.”

“But my mother wanted her children to be educated by nuns and priests all dressed in black, the way it had been done down through the generations with her people. Taught by people who had a firm grasp of how big and awful the world could be.”

“What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.”

“Remember. Your breath is a prayer.”

“We must be kind and forgive one another or we won’t survive. But even among the most religious there seems to be a great blind spot covering the world, an inability to learn from past experience. Civilization is as precarious as a sand castle. All the care and effort it took to create it can be knocked down in a second by some bully or another. And the world is full of bullies.”

“Religion is the path of divisions, boundaries and narrowness. Spirituality is the path of love, light, beauty and oneness.”

“La Iglesia de Roma no perdió nunca la esperanza de una reconciliación con sus ovejas descarriadas. Esperaba el regreso del hijo pródigo y difícilmente podía buscar esa reconciliación lanzando un ataque propagandístico que ofendiera aún más a aquellos cuya lealtad se quiere recobrar.”

“Unlike wealth, poverty of intellect is equally distributed between the sexes and among the races.”

“Logic dictates that if you believe in one, you have to reconcile the existence of the other.”