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Religion
has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty.
It
survives on the level of activities rather than
in the stillness of
commitment. -Abraham
Joshua Heschel
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The only struggle which religions can
justify, the only struggle worthy of humans,
is the moral
struggle against humanity's own disordered passions,
against
every kind of selfishness, against attempts to oppress
others,
against every type of hatred and violence.
-Pope John Paul II
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| Love
and kindness are the basis of my religious beliefs.
The
rituals and outward signs are not as important as
one's
actions and deeds. Religion should be a path to God,
not
something to fight about. -Bernie Siegel |
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This is what I found
out about religion: it gives you courage
to make the
decisions you must make in a crisis and the confidence
to
leave the results to a higher Power. Only by trust in God
can a person carrying responsibility find repose.
-Dwight
D. Eisenhower
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| No person has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as
to forget
in one's own ease the service due one's neighbor;
nor has any person
a right to be so immersed in active life
as to neglect the contemplation of God.
-St. Augustine |
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| I would rather live in a world where
my life is surrounded by mystery
than live in a world so
small that my mind could comprehend it.
-Harry Emerson Fosdick |
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| I also see the world of religion.
I see some
of my brothers and sisters trying to
be
religious without being fully human.
They seem a little
rigid and narrow at
times, wanting to be holy, but not
human.
They seem to be winning a place in heaven, without
realizing or enjoying the beauty
of earth. They keep the
ten commandments,
but their observances look so joyless.
Such a world seems small
and the air in that world is
stale. -John Powell, S.J. |
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| I believe
in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the
breath of His affections,
feel His invisible hand,
drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess
an
inner consciousness of a particular Providence and of a
universal mind
that marks out for me the course of my own
destiny. -Miguel de Unamuno |
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| During the past thirty
years, people from all civilized countries on the earth
have consulted me. Among all my patients in the second
half of life--
that is to say, over thirty-five--there has
not been one whose problem
in the last resort was not
that of finding a religious outlook on life.
It is safe
to say that every one of them fell ill because he or she had
lost that which
the living religions of every age have
given to their followers, and none of them
has been
really healed who did not regain his or her religious outlook.
-Carl Jung |
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| Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
things are honest,
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report;
if there be any virtue, and if
there be any praise, think on these things.
-The Bible |
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| People
will wrangle for religion, write for it,
fight for it,
die for it; anything but live for it.
-Charles Caleb Colton |
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| Religion exists not to
answer all questions, or to clear up all mysteries;
if
that were its purpose, it could never be accomplished,
for life grows,
not less, but more mysterious as the
intellect enters more fully into its truth. . .
Religion
leaves a million questions unanswered and apparently
unanswerable.
Its purpose and object is not to make people certain and cock-sure about everything,
but to make
them certain about those things of which they must be certain
if they
are to live a human life at all. Religion does not
relieve us
from the duty of thought; it makes possible
for a person to begin thinking.
-G.A. Studdert-Kennedy |
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God is alive in
flowers and snowflakes, in sunsets and rainbows,
in the
flash of lightning and the crash of thunder, in the calm
in the eye of the hurricane. Wherever there is life there
is God.
God is not far off on a throne in the sky;
He is alive today
in all men who walk the earth. He is
the life that surrounds
and penetrates us here and now. God is alive in people. . . .
God is not a static image; He lives in
everything and everyone.
He is in the flight of an eagle
and in the writing of a sonnet.
He is everywhere. He is
in the farthest star and the newborn baby.
He will
survive the denial of men and the blast of nuclear
destruction.
Let us affirm the invincibility of God--for
God is life eternal. -Wilferd
A. Peterson |
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| The
essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.
-Simone
Weil |
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| True religion is the life
we live, not the creed we profess.
-J.F.
Wright |
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| The
heart of Religion is not an opinion about God,
such as philosophy
might reach as the conclusion
of an argument; it is a personal relationship with God.
-William
Temple |
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| We have been looking
for the burning bush, the parting of the sea,
the
bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking
at the ordinary day-by day events in our lives for
evidence of the miraculous. -M.
Scott Peck |
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| Religion
is never devoid of emotion, any more than love is.
It is
not a defect of religion, but rather its glory,
that it
speaks always the language of feeling. -Elton Trueblood |
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The
church must be reminded that it is not
the master or the
servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the
state. -Martin
Luther
King, Jr.
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There is no religion without love,
and people may talk as much as they like
about their
religion, but if it does not teach them to be
good and
kind to person and beast, it is all a sham.
-Anna Sewell |
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Being religious means asking passionately
the question of the meaning of our existence
and being
willing to receive answers,
even if the answers hurt. -Paul Tillich |
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Science
and religion, religion and science, put it
as I may, they
are two sides of the same glass,
through which we see
darkly until these two,
focusing together, reveal the
truth. -Pearl Buck |
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Religion
should be our steering wheel, not our spare tire.
-Charles
L. Wheeler |
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I have gone back--well, I was about to say that
I had gone back to religion;
but that would not be accurate. I have gone forward to a
new concept of religion.
I no longer have the faintest interest in the differences in creeds
that divide the
churches. But I am tremendously interested in what religion does
for me, just as
I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for
me. They help
me to lead a richer, fuller, happier life. But religion does far
more than that. It brings
me spiritual values. It gives me, as William James puts it,
"a new zest for life. . . more
life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life." It gives
me faith, hope, and courage.
It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives
purpose to my life--and
direction. It vastly improves my happiness. It gives me
abounding health. It helps
me to create for myself "an oasis of peace amidst the whirling
sands of life." -Dale Carnegie |
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Religion is
more like a response to a friend
than it is like obedience to an expert.
-Austin Farrer |
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I
would not say I believe. I know! I have had the
experience
of being gripped
by something that is stronger
than myself,
something that people call God.
-Carl
Jung |
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You think religion is what's
inside a little building
filled with pretty lights
from
stained glass windows. But it's not. It's
wings! Wings! -Dorothy Canfield Fisher |
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I think many of the
troubles we run into are due to our treating the sacred
as something abstract. This attitude is part of
what allows us to do great harm
to nature and ourselves.
If our religion is completely ethereal, we may
become numb
to the consequences of, for example, building
a chemical plant that could be toxic
to children in the
community. Not only that, but restricting religion
to a high-in-the-sky
place tends to make people polemical
about their own moral positions--to the degree
that they
can justify harming others who disagree with them. We've
seen this
phenomenon take place in country after country.
I think we would be able to live
in this world more
peaceably if our spirituality were to come from looking
not just
into infinity but very closely at the world
around us--and appreciating its depth and divinity.
-Thomas Moore
(contemporary) |
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The enduring value of
religion is in its challenge
to aspiration and hope in
the mind of people. -Ernest Martin Hopkins |
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Religious
faith is not a
storm
cellar to which men
and women
can
flee
for
refuge from the
storms
of life. It is, instead,
an
inner spiritual strength
which
enables them to face
those storms
with hope
and serenity.
Religious
faith has
the miraculous
power
to lift ordinary
human beings
to
greatness
in seasons of stress. -Sam J. Ervin, Jr. |
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"Religion"
can no more be equated with what goes on in churches than
"education"
can be reduced to what happens in
schools or "health care" restricted to what
doctors
do to patients in clinics. The vast
majority of healing and learning goes on
among parents
and children and families and friends, far from the
portals
of any school or hospital. The same is true
for religion. It is going on
around us all the time. Religion is larger and more pervasive than churches.
-Harvey Cox |
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The historical
religions have the tendency to become ends
in themselves,
and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place,
and,
in fact, there is
nothing that is so apt
to obscure God's
face as a religion. -Martin Buber |
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Our
religious institutions have far too often become
handmaidens of the status quo,
while the genuine
religious experience is anything but that. True
religion is by nature
disruptive of what has been, giving
birth to the eternally new. -Marianne
Williamson |
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I am for
religion, against religions. -Victor Hugo |
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If your religion does not change you,
then
you had better change your religion.
-Elbert Hubbard |
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If I
should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment
I could never stay there five minutes. But why come
out?
The street is as false as the church.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Religion
is to be used as a stepping stone
to God but it must never be used as a tower
to hold one aloft from others. We are all cells
in the body of humanity. When anyone
attempts to isolate another, they
only isolate themselves more.
-Peace
Pilgrim |
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If
your religion is of the kind that can be
easily hidden,
it can be easily lost. -Martha
Lupton |
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If
you hold your religion lightly you are sure to let it
slip. -Martha
Lupton |
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When
people ask the Dalai Lama, "Is Buddhism a religion?" he
answers,
"Yes, it is." Then they ask, "What kind of
religion is it?" He responds,
"My religion is kindness."
You might think, "Everyone's is."
Everyone's is. That's true. It's not complicated to
describe the goal
of a spiritual life. It's easier than you think to explain it.
It's more difficult than you can imagine to do it.
-Sylvia
Boorstein |
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If we submit everything to reason, our religion
will have nothing in it
mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of
reason, our
religion will be absurd and ridiculous.
-Blaise Pascal |
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The
religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so,
but it demands a teaching which can be understood.
Slowly an
apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing
among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while
application of that power—in the improvement of the world.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
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Every major religion has
similar ideas of love, the same goal of benefiting through
spiritual practice, and the same effect of making its followers into
better
human beings. All religions teach moral precepts for perfecting
the functions
of the mind, body, and speech. All teach us not to lie or steal
or take others' lives,
and so on. The common goal of all moral precepts laid down by
the great
teachers of humanity is unselfishness. Those teachers wanted to
lead their
followers away from the paths of negative deeds caused by ignorance
and to introduce them to paths of goodness. All religions can
learn from
one another; their ultimate goal is to produce better human beings who
will be more tolerant, more compassionate, and less selfish.
-The
Dalai Lama |
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The religious
searcher should be a diver through the deeps of ancient wisdom,
seeking to bring up to the surface those concepts that can illuminate
life today.
Not all truth will be discovered in what is to come;
some must be recalled from what has been forgotten.
-David J. Wolfe |
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Many people conceive of
religion as something apart from
everyday affairs of the world. They think of it in terms of
ceremony or ritual or sermons and often it strikes them as
being dull or not particularly interesting. Religion may be
described in many ways. I like to think of it as a
medicine,
a healing medicine for the mind. -Norman Vincent Peale |
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There
are many religions seeking to bring comfort and happiness to humanity,
just as there are many treatments for a particular disease. All
religions
endeavor to help living beings avoid misery and find happiness.
Although we
may prefer one religious perspective to another, there is a much
stronger
case for unity, stemming from common desires of the human heart.
Each religion works to lessen suffering and contribute to the world;
conversion is not the point. I do not think about converting
others to Buddhism
or merely furthering the Buddhist cause. Instead, I try to think
of how I
as a Buddhist can contribute to the happiness of all living beings.
-unattributed |
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A
religious person is one who holds God and people in
one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm
done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion,
whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
-Abraham
Joshua Heschel |
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