Religions Quotes

“Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”
― Victor Stenger

“Yoga is the art work of awareness on the canvas of body, mind, and soul.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style

“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Tell them we may not be praying with them," Father told the Vicar, "but we are at least not actively praying against them.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Jerusalem! My Love,My Town

I wept until my tears were dry
I prayed until the candles flickered
I knelt until the floor creaked
I asked about Mohammed and Christ
Oh Jerusalem, the fragrance of prophets
The shortest path between earth and sky
Oh Jerusalem, the citadel of laws
A beautiful child with fingers charred
and downcast eyes
You are the shady oasis passed by the Prophet
Your streets are melancholy
Your minarets are mourning
You, the young maiden dressed in black
Who rings the bells at the Nativity Church,
On sunday morning?
Who brings toys for the children
On Christmas eve?
Oh Jerusalem, the city of sorrow
A big tear wandering in the eye
Who will halt the aggression
On you, the pearl of religions?
Who will wash your bloody walls?
Who will safeguard the Bible?
Who will rescue the Quran?
Who will save Christ, From those who have killed Christ?
Who will save man?
Oh Jerusalem my town
Oh Jerusalem my love
Tomorrow the lemon trees will blossom
And the olive trees will rejoice
Your eyes will dance
The migrant pigeons will return
To your sacred roofs
And your children will play again
And fathers and sons will meet
On your rosy hills
My town
The town of peace and olives”
― Nizar Qabbani

“Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults.”
― Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman

“BLACK AND WHITE


I was born into
A religion of Light,
But with so many other
Religions and
Philosophies,
How do I know which
ONE
Is right?

Is it not
My birthright
To seek out the light?
To find Truth
After surveying all the proof,
Am I supposed
To love
Or fight?
And why do all those who
Try to guide me,
Always start by dividing
And multiplying me –
From what they consider
Wrong or right?
I thought,
There were no walls
For whoever beams truth and light.
And how can one speak on Light's behalf,
lf all they do
Is act black,
But talk WHITE?”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“You are here to evolve and make your consciousness high.You are here to dance, sing and celebrate life. You are here to help others to make their life happy. We are here not to compete, but to learn, evolve and excel. We are not here to make divisions in the name of prophets and religions. We are here to encompass the world with love and light.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

“Diversity of character is due to the unequal time given to values. Only through each other will we see the importance of the qualities we lack and our unfinished soul's potential.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“To realize the truth, you have to cross the boundaries of all religions and prophets.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Religious structure often dilutes the spiritual experience.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

“Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“Bapu Gandhi said, ‘All religions are true.’ I just want to love God.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.”
― Aberjhani, The American Poet Who Went Home Again

“I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“Religions do good when they make peace on earth.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code, that is expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of belifs, values, and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“The greatest skeptic must now admit that the land and sea-borne trade of India had given her a world-wide fame not only for her gold, spices and silk, but for her religions and philosophies also.”
― Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

“I had become a devotee to a religion of my own creation. Its most integral ritual was maintaining a precise calm especially when angry, when hurt, when terrified.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black

“It is undoubtedly true that religion is often socially conservative. By binding a people together under a shared God, a common cosmology and a common morality, religion creates order and stability and its rituals create social cohesio...n. By promising to the pious poor rewards in the next life, it reconciles them to their fate in this one and thus discourages them from rebelling against their condition...
[also] religion [is] an inspiration to radicalism and rebellion. religion is a potential threat to any political or social order because it claims an authority higher than any available in this world. pp. 10-11”
― Steve Bruce, Politics and Religion

“When we hear the old bells ringing out on a Sunday morning, we ask ourselves: can it be possible? This for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was the son of God. The proof of such a claim is wanting. Within our times the Christian religion is surely an antiquity jutting out from a far-distant olden time; and the fact that people believe such a claim...is perhaps the oldest part of this heritage. A god who conceives children with a mortal woman; a wise man who calls us to work no more; to judge no more; but to heed the signs of the imminent apocalypse; a justice that accepts the innocent man as a proxy sacrifice; someone who has his disciplines drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of the afterlife, to which death is the gate; the figure of the cross as a symbol, in a time that no longer knows the purpose and shame of the cross - how horribly all this wafts over us, as from the grave of the ancient past! Are we to believe that such things are still believed?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“When a misfortune strikes us, we can overcome it either by removing its cause or else by changing the effect it has on our feelings, that is, by reinterpreting the misfortune as good, whose benefit may only later become clear. Religion and art (as well as metaphysical philosophy) strive to effect a change in our feeling, in part by changing the way we judge experiences...and in part by awakening a pleasure in pain, in emotion generally...The more a person tends to reinterpret and justify, the less will he confront the causes of the misfortune and eliminate them; a momentary palliation and narcotization (as used, for example, for a toothache) is also enough for him in more serious suffering. The more the rule of religions and all narcotic arts decrease, the more squarely do men confront the real elimination of the misfortune - of course, this is bad for the tragic poets (there being less and less material for the tragedy, because the realm of the inexorable, invincible fate grows ever smaller) but it is even worse for the priests (for until now they had fed on the narcotization of human misfortunes).”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“We all live in the past. Your parents have given you a certain conditioning. The society has given you a certain conditioning, and to live in that conditioning is to live your life in a prison. The religions have forced you to be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan or a Buddhist, which are all conditionings. 
Meditation is a freedom from all these conditionings that parents, the society and the religions have forced on you. Unless you are free you will never be able to hear your own authentic inner voice. 
Your parents will tell you "do this and don't do this." The priests will goon creating guilt and shame in you. They will not allow you to be yourself.  Nobody in the world is really interested in anybody else being given the freedom to be himself or herself. Everybody is trying to impose their ideas and ideologies on others.  That is why humanity is in such misery and chaos. 
We have created an ugly world, where we have not allowed children to be themselves.  We have created a prison made of ideas, theologies and ideologies. You can think that you are free, but you are not free. We have to get rid of this prison. We have to uncondition ourselves, sothat we become free. It is first when the whole sky is ours that the whole existence is ours. When one realizes this, one just wants freedom, joy, silence,  awareness, truth and love. In that inner silence and freedom,the whole heritage of humanity becomes ours. Then we know that truth is within ourselves. 
My first book in English, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart, is dedicated to my parents, Essy and Sven, with the dedication: "My parents, who taught me what love and freedom are.” My whole childhood was an atmosphere and climate of love and freedom. An American astrologer said in an astrology  session in the United States that my mother seemed to be a very special  woman. She was so rebellious that the boys in elementary school held herdown and shot her in the foot with an air rifle.  Once when I was in high school, I wanted to  have a little parental conflict, and said to my mother that I would never go back to school again. My mother replied: I would never do that either. This atmosphere and climate of love and freedom made me always feel that I could be who I am. It also taught me early to listen to my inner true voice, which early began to guide me in life.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten, Man is Part of the Whole: Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Compassion, Freedom and Grace

“A small puddle will reflect the moon in its own way and the big ocean will reflect it in its own way. Then there is great controversy. Hindus say something, Mohammedans say something else, Christians say something else again – and so on, so forth. The controversy is foolish. The conflict is meaningless. God is reflected in millions of ways, in millions of mirrors. Each mirror reflects in its own way. This is one of the fundamentals to be understood. Not understanding this fundamental there is naturally antagonism between religions, because they all think, “If our standpoint is right then the other has to be wrong.” Their rightness depends on the other’s wrongness. This is stupid. God is infinite, and you can look at him through many ways, through many windows. And naturally you can look at him only through yourself – you will be the window. Your God will reflect God as much as it will reflect you; you will both be there.”
― Rajneesh

“A mere declaration that all religions are good would be a fruitless exercise as we all internally know that this cannot be the case. A more sensible approach would be to actually work towards a truly good religion – a universal religion – through consensus and deliberations and then let that be the ONLY religion sufficient for human beings. [...] each society/individual should be given liberty to fill in minor details as per their own needs, without transgressing the overall framework.”
― Sanjeev Newar, Eternal Religion of Humanity

“Religions are like carwashes. The car may look nice and shiny on the outside, but inside it remains messy and unclean. Why else do you think religious people rape, torture, and murder in the name of their religion?”
― Jack Freestone