Top 100 Quotes About Religious Life
#1. Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.
George Pattison
#2. At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.
Huston Smith
#3. The varieties of religious belief are an advantage, since all faiths are good, so far as they encourage us to lead a religious life. The more sects there are, the more opportunities there are for making a successful appeal to the divine instinct in all of us.
Swami Vivekananda
#4. You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.
C.S. Lewis
#5. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.
C.S. Lewis
#7. The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life
Adolf Hitler
#8. The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.
Muhammad Iqbal
#9. There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books ... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.
Paul Vitz
#10. Jesus Christ, with His divine understanding of every understanding of our human nature, understood that not all men were called to the religious life, that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world, and, to a certain extent, for the world.
James Joyce
#11. In India, religious life forms the centre, the keynote of the whole music of national life.
Swami Vivekananda
#12. Heaven is not to be looked upon only as the reward, but the natural effect, of a religious life.
Joseph Addison
#13. Religious life ought to promote growth in the Church by way of attraction. The Church must be attractive. Wake up the world! Be witnesses of a different way of doing things, of acting, of living! It is possible to live differently in this world.
Pope Francis
#14. The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying - indeed a rival of the religious life.
Randolph Bourne
#15. According to Father O'Dowd's description, the seminary catered to both ends of the religious life, training the next crop of young men taking holy orders and providing a retirement home for those closer to discovering if they'd backed the right horse.
David J. Oldman
#16. It is easy to turn our religious life into a cathedral for beautiful memories, but there are feet to be washed ...
Oswald Chambers
#17. They who search after the Philosopher's Stone [are] by their own rules obliged to a strict and religious life.
Isaac Newton
#18. This watchfulness, this witnessing is the ultimate secret of creating a religious life, of creating a life of transcendence, a life of spirituality, of enlightenment, of buddhahood.
Rajneesh
#19. The orthodox Jewish faith practically excludes woman from religious life.
Abraham Cahan
#20. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#21. Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.
Jennifer Stone
#22. Perpetual Adoration, Eucharistic Adoration offers to our people the opportunity to join those in religious life to pray for the salvation of the world, souls everywhere and peace on earth. We cannot underestimate the power of prayer and the difference it will make in our world
Mother Teresa
#23. I have decided to follow in my sinful ways, and have largely abandoned the increasingly religious life I was leading over the previous months, including several hours of Talmudic study a day.
Luke Ford
#24. It is because we underrate thought, because we do not see what a great element it is in religious life, that there is so little of practical and consistent religion among us.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#25. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Jon Meacham
#26. To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.
Alan Watts
#27. Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.
Karen Armstrong
#28. In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture
and American culture has triumphed.
Alan Wolfe
#29. If you are determined on the religious life, you have to toughen up your mind. You have to let it be a thouroughfare for all thoughts, and among them you must make choices.
Robertson Davies
#30. He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.
Gregory Maguire
#31. While studying at Barcelona, Ignatius was in doubt whether, after completing his studies, he should enter some Religious Order, or go from place to place, according to his custom. He decided to enter upon the religious life.
Saint Ignatius
#32. Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of his religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
#33. You learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life. Or, if we talk about it, we'll find a secular way of doing it that will not be offensive to people of non-belief. So, that you go through life with these alternate voices.
Richard Rodriguez
#34. After a while, if you're committed, you start to believe in the things in which you're praying. It's just cognitive dissonance. You can't live a completely religious life and not start to have it sink in.
A. J. Jacobs
#35. With that height, plus a face of an ugliness so transcendant as to be grotesquely beautiful, it was obvious why she had embraced a religious life
Christ was the only man from whom she might expect embrace in return.
Diana Gabaldon
#36. Mother Teresa, when asked about her holiness or saintliness, always answers in a matter-of-fact way that holiness is a necessity of life--and explains that it is not the luxury of a few, such as those who take the course of religious life, but is "a simple duty of all. Holiness is for everyone.
Lucinda Vardey
#37. I think people can live a religious life and yet believe in things maybe outside the box a little bit.
Billy Bob Thornton
#38. You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.
David Kudler
#39. Religious life has to become an expression of the gifts of the person. (You don't) simply throw away your personality, your giftedness and leave everything at the gate and go in and expect to find Jesus.
Dolores Hart
#40. Dogme is like leading a religious life, in that you are freeing yourself from making certain choices. It makes life easier.
Susanne Bier
#41. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D.
Timothy Leary
#42. He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.
J.D. Salinger
#43. The devil put before me that I could not endure the trials of the religious life, because of my delicate nurture. I defended myself against him by alleging the trials which Christ endured, and that it was not much for me to suffer something for His sake; besides, He would help me to bear it.
Saint Teresa Of Avila
#44. In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)
Alvin Plantinga
#45. Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God?
Dallas Willard
#46. The test of a man's religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. The worth of a man is revealed in his attitude to ordinary things when he is not before the footlights.
Oswald Chambers
#47. I make no apologies for the fact that I have a religious life of my own. I'm speaking as a Christian because I'm speaking as myself.
Krista Tippett
#48. I think it's not particularly necessary to lead a religious life. People progress just as well in music, or art, or math or science or gardening or whatever. It all seems to work as well and the process is good.
Jim Henson
#49. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.
Walter Rauschenbusch
#50. In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.
Muhammad Iqbal
#51. Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.
Malcolm Boyd
#52. We're not at a point in time to be taking chances with children and young people in the church. The Holy Father himself said ... there is no room in the priesthood or religious life for someone who has abused a child. I think he's right.
Roger Mahony
#53. I'd say my religious life has shaped my worldview; my writing, I'd say too, is an extension of the pulpit ... it reaches folks who don't care for organized religion in a different way.
Uwem Akpan
#54. I thought that coming out was going to be the end of my religious life but actually it was the beginning. Because it only afterwards that I could be honest about who I was, what I wanted, how I understood spirituality.
Jay Michaelson
#55. The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's life.
Edith Stein
#56. I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of mankind, and that I could not do unless I took part in politics.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. One should not seek among others the truth that can be easily gotten from the Church. For in her, as in a rich treasury, the apostles have placed all that pertains to truth, so that everyone can drink this beverage of life. She is the door of life.
Irenaeus Of Lyons
#58. Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious; it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious.
Madame De Stael
#59. I wish I was a more religious person. I really admire Martin Sheen for his Catholicism. It's such a bedrock. I wish I had that in my life.
Rob Lowe
#60. A solicitor had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation, a feeling that this life cannot possibly be all, and that it is not possible for consciousness to end with the end of life.
John Lanchester
#61. I wanted my eternity in carbon molecules, in being part of the trees, the sky, air itself
Ruth Ahmed
#62. A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the lord in vain- then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?
Robert A. Heinlein
#63. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life.
Mark Twain
#64. Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves.
Mark Twain
#65. The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.
Helen Waddell
#66. Positive secularism is not tolerance of all religions, but it is the total denial of religious beliefs: it is the emergence of homogeneous human outlook which is based upon verifiable facts of life.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
#67. The heart and life of a woman is much more vast than that. All women are made in the image of God in that we bring forth life. When we offer our tender and strong feminine hearts to the world and to those we love, we cannot help but mother them.
Stasi Eldredge
#68. Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.
Uri Avnery
#69. Even with all its positive attributes, capitalism in its imperialistic form is the most treacherous system mankind ever devised. It is driven by a selfishness that has an almost religious underlining to it.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#70. It is about time that the religious and environmental faithful joined forces. No one wins when divisive politics pits the right to human life against the sanctity of biodiversity, or family values against ecosystem services. There are infinite compatible reasons to love, cherish and steward Earth.
Alex Bruce
#71. I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.
Richard Dawkins
#72. Chronology of any event worked best in obituaries. It had no place in the world of sentiment, where memories, ideas and assumptions co-existed side by side.
Noorilhuda
#73. In Western lands there is a distinct division between the religious and the secular life. There is one rule of conduct for laymen and another for clergymen. This distinction has never found its place in the life of the people of India. There, all of life is included in the word 'religion.'
Virchand Gandhi
#74. Buddha, Confucius, or Socrates can bring us good teaching, moral excellence, and religious philosophy. For this they may be commended as rendering help and aid to humanity. But Jesus Christ is different: He brings us Himself as our Life.
Chip Brogden
#75. Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.
Alexander Schmemann
#76. How you live your life on this side of the grave determines what happens next.
Andy Stanley
#77. Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien ... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.
Terence McKenna
#78. Discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties.
Noah Webster
#79. If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. As humanism begins to dominate the state, the consequence is complete hostile annexation of the church or persecution by separation. Religion is then removed from the marketplace and the school, later from other domains of public life. The state will not toerlate any gods besides itself.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#81. Modern religious teaching have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues.
Josef Pieper
#82. Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God's help, it will continue to be.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#83. She had been notably religious, but that was gradually wearing off as she advanced in years. The rigid strictness of Sabbatarian practice requires the full energy of middle life.
Anthony Trollope
#84. Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.
Phillip Adams
#85. The American Dream has always focused on building a better life for yourself and your family, striving for success, and even fleeing from religious prosecution.
Marc Veasey
#86. Americans have not only a right but a responsibility to consider the values of those who seek to lead them - whether they arise from life experience, political ideology or religious belief.
Gary Bauer
#87. A part of us resists all of this and wants to make it sound as if it's much too religious, an arbitrary thing that we have to do with our life. This is nonsense. This is the real fun.
Frederick Lenz
#88. That's because international Islamic religious fanatics have the same goal as the Axis fascists - the destruction of our way of life.
David Hackworth
#89. Regardless of the perpetual battle between believers and atheists, for me, religion is a tool of making friends, rather than making enemies.
Abhijit Naskar
#90. I believe that the real expression of your religious beliefs is shown in the daily pattern of your life, in what you contribute to your surroundings and what you take away without infringing on the rights of other people.
Judy Garland
#91. It could take few drops of cooking oil to change your life, your neibourghs,your community, your village, your city, your county or your entire country.
Euginia Herlihy
#92. Blind faith in belief-system, ideologies, doctrine or dogma can never set us free. Only the knowledge of truth can liberate us from the slavery of doctrine, dogmas, blind faiths and religious sects.
Banani Ray
#93. Life is truly a miracle and must be protected, safeguarded and treasured.
Q.M. Herrera
#94. Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail.
Russell Kirk
#95. The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#96. Reporters treat religion as beneath mention, as personally distasteful, or as a clear and present threat to the American way of life.
Robert Bork
#97. Religious people ... hold a kind and merciful view of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the hopeless. Yet too often, they will not extend that spirit to our fellow creatures.
Matthew Scully
#98. When asked, 'What is more important: praying or reading the Bible?' I ask, 'What is more important: breathing in or breathing out?
Russ Scalzo
#99. You should have a kind heart because you are not just a so and so person,you are also an identity who is part of the almighty god,who above all likes kindness because,he is the bestower of all desired attributes but is benevolently looking for kindness from his creation
Jaspreet Kaur
#100. It is the season of giving, a season of love, 'For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believe in Him should not perish, have everlasting life,' (John 3:16).
Euginia Herlihy
