Religious Experience Quotes

#1. Then "wrong" is right, and "right" is wrong! Yet I'll tell you this, to help you out of your dilemma: believe nothing I say. Simply live it. Experience it. Then live whatever other paradigm you want to construct. Afterward, look to your experience to find your truth.

Neale Donald Walsch

#2. A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.

Rene Dubos

#3. It did something to the temporal lobe, one of the circuits involved in religious experience. It was supposed to put people closer to God. It did that. It also made them slaves.

Ramez Naam

#4. 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

#5. His Holiness brings a wealth of experience to this exalted office. The United Nations and the Holy See share a strong commitment to peace, social justice, human dignity, religious freedom and mutual respect among the world's religions.

Kofi Annan

#6. I'm fairly certain I'm having my first truly religious experience, and it's probably a very bad thing that it's happening in a church, but it's over a sculpture. Mental note: Add idol worship to your list for confession.

Lisa Desrochers

#7. I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without - I was never really given a religion or a religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to.

James Taylor

#8. The fact that Newton and Michael Faraday and other scientists of the past were deeply religious shows that religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centuries of experience in the study of nature.

Steven Weinberg

#9. The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Francis Spufford

#10. While some people are apprehensive that meditation may conflict with their beliefs, the usual experience is that it leads to a heightened appreciation of their particular religious leanings and a greater level of personal joy

Ian Gawler

#11. Forever is longer than you know. Eternal is longer than Forever. God is more than you imagine. God is the energy you call imagination. God is creation. God is first thought. And God is last experience. And God is everything in between.

Neale Donald Walsch

#12. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.

Tommy Lapid

#13. Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.

Deepak Chopra

#14. For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.

Mircea Eliade

#15. Aulas spotted early that most soccer fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there.

Simon Kuper

#16. The spiritual experience isn't one of filling ourselves up - with either religious or intellectual beliefs - but of emptying ourselves so that we can experience what is, directly, unfiltered.

Kevin Griffin

#17. Religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.

William James

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. It must never be forgotten that the purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is to sober up alcoholics. There is no religious or spiritual requirement for membership. No demands are made on anyone. An experience is offered which members may accept or reject. That is up to them.

Bill W.

#21. A really religious person has no theology. Yes, he has the experience, he has the truth, he has that luminosity, but he has no theology.

Rajneesh

#22. The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.

Max Weber

#23. No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.

Hu Shih

#24. The dialectical change of mind that occurs in Buddhism is not simply the assimilation of a new philosophical basis or religious basis for viewing and interpreting experience. Rather it is the complete structural revision of that which is.

Frederick Lenz

#25. A real good leader is faithful
to a special gift of a near-death experience
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Religion of Blue Circle
October 8, 2016
Babaji

Petra Hermans

#26. As a religious priest I find it a very enriching experience to do my scientific research.

George Coyne

#27. The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail.

Aldous Huxley

#28. Any musical person who has never heard a Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor sing these old songs has missed one of the most thrilling emotions which the human heart may experience.

James Weldon Johnson

#29. Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me it's a form of sacrament.

Sally Quinn

#30. Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.

Erma Bombeck

#31. The marriage of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored in all cultures and by every religious faith. It's in this institution that children are meant to be nurtured. We know this after thousands of years of human experience.

Jeff Miller

#32. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

Frederick Buechner

#33. Religious faith may very well be considered a science, for it responds invariably to certain formulae. Perform the technique of faith according to the laws which have been proved workable in human experience and you will always get a result of power.

Norman Vincent Peale

#34. Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.

Abhijit Naskar

#35. Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.

Erma Bombeck

#36. I explained that often when we revealed ourselves to mortals we drove them mad - for we were unnatural beings, and yet we did not know anything about the existence of God or the Devil. In sum, we were like a religious vision without revelation. A mystic experience, but without a core of truth.

Anne Rice

#37. 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

#38. Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.

Henry Beston

#39. To know and experience what God can do, we must first realize and acknowledge what we cannot do. We must get our eyes off of ourselves and our limited ability, and totally onto Him and His infinite power.

Joyce Meyer

#40. I really do think that art can save you in some sense. It's the last meaning, unless you're religious-and I'm not religious. It's the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have. It's an immediate self-validating experience. It lifts you beyond your mortal clay.

Sam Savage

#41. I love theater. I think theater, when its done right, is the best, like a religious experience. When it is done badly, it's the worst thing. It's just an incredible experience.

John Leguizamo

#42. This isn't just a shopping mall. It's more like ... "
"A religious experience?"
"Exactly! It's like going to church ...

J.G. Ballard

#43. You don't have to do anything! If you enjoy life at this level, if you feel this is the ultimate for you, you can have this experience over and over and over again!

Neale Donald Walsch

#44. 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

#45. I'm good at doing the laundry. At least that. And it's a religious experience ... Water, earth, fire-polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, dirty and clean. The great cycles-round and round-beginning and end-Alpha and Omega, amen.

Robert Fulghum

#46. Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.

Terence McKenna

#47. As it is impossible to verbally describe the sweetness of honey to one who has never tasted honey, so the goodness of God cannot be clearly communicated by way of teaching if we ourselves are not able to penetrate into the goodness of the Lord by our own experience.

Saint Basil

#48. A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.

Lisa Randall

#49. However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.

Carl Jung

#50. Religious traditions hold enormous value, extraordinary wisdom, breathtaking insights into the human experience, but they are limited to the degree that there has not been a new theological idea expressed by any of the major religions for thousands of years.

Neale Donald Walsch

#51. If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced.

Thomas Berry

#52. I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God's grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

Marilynne Robinson

#53. One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature - a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man.

William Winwood Reade

#54. Whereas cognitive constraints on negative emotions can reduce distress, freeing positive emotions from such constraints can enhance religious experience.

Gerald L. Clore

#55. And I blink at the ceiling, seeing stars. "Holy fuck."
Her back shudders with a giggle. "It was kind of a religious experience, wasn't it?

Emma Chase

#56. Take a pinch of belief in God, add a dash of desire to experience God, stir in emotion to taste, and you have a recipe for religious experience.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

#57. Good Lord," I whisper at my thoughts, barely stifling a shiver. "Kissing me is similar to a religious experience, or so I've been told." Gleaming green eyes meet mine as he teases me.

Anonymous

#58. Faith is the proper name of religious experience.

John Baillie

#59. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

Robert Graves

#60. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

Eugene H. Peterson

#61. As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.

Patricia Lockwood

#62. Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

Muhammad Iqbal

#63. Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.

D.H. Lawrence

#64. Going out on a date was very cheap in those days [1962]. I borrowed my father's station wagon, put in a gallon of gas for 29 cents, went to the movies for 50 cents a ticket, bought a pack of cigarettes for 25 cents, and had a McDonald's hamburger for 19 cents apiece. It was very doable.

Aslan Ben Eliahou

#65. Dexter Blake liked a woman with some junk in her trunk. And the tall, curvy chick on the sidelines was packing a whole lot of booty.

She had one of those itty-bitty waists, too. And her cups floweth'd over.

Staring at her chest was practically a religious experience.

Amy Andrews

#66. [W]hen one has a religious experience, what is 'true' is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality. To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science.

Jerry A. Coyne

#67. The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.

Pamela Stephenson

#68. If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in his presence.

Oswald Chambers

#69. The angels started singing, the clouds parted, it was a religious experience. I've never had the same reaction to a product, not in 25 years.

Guy Kawasaki

#70. If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#71. Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Thomas Jefferson

#72. I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be.

Ayad Akhtar

#73. We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.

William James

#74. While I have never been a regular churchgoer, I'm anything but immune to the power and the majesty of the religious experience.

Joseph Barbera

#75. This is the great divide on how we approach the Bible. Does it express the heart and mind of a divine person, or is it merely a record of human religious experience?

John Piper

#76. I got to a point where kind of a oneness with everything and a great compassion. It teaches you compassion. It was a great, enlightening experience, a spiritual experience. Not particularly religious, but spiritual. It was great. I can still go there.

Larry Hagman

#77. I'm not religious, but I've always been attracted to the rituals of religion; as a kid, Sunday church was the closest thing I had to an interactive, theatrical experience.

Missy Mazzoli

#78. Reading a non-fiction book is like a religious experience.

Rachel Perry

#79. There is no real religious experience that does not express itself in charity.

C. H. Dodd

#80. These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fullfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.

Sigmund Freud

#81. Sometimes the Lord gives us a free sample of religious experience, but for more, we must pay a price with the currency of sincere dedication to the process of cleansing.

Radhanath Swami

#82. Some presters might tell you never to question, but that is tantamount to telling you not to think. Odun created us to explore, to experience. There is no harm in asking questions ...

Kevin J. Anderson

#83. Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof ... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.

Carl Sagan

#84. Going to my shows, it's like a religious experience, because you come out, you go in one person, you come out a different person.

Michael Jackson

#85. If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?

Sigmund Freud

#86. If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion, teaching classes in religion, preaching in a local church. That is fine and noble activity. But I do not feel entitled to engage in it. So for me philosophy is my fate.

Simon Critchley

#87. All who have actually attained any real religious experience never wrangle over the form in which the different religions are expressed. They know that the soul of all religions is the same and so they have no quarrel with anybody just because he or she does not speak in the same tongue.

Swami Vivekananda

#88. We can know God, we can understand God to the extent that we as humans are able, and we can experience God in our own theology and faith development; this is absolute truth.

Sanejo I. Leonard

#89. Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world?

Italo Calvino

#90. Probably the first time I left Italy was to travel by train to Lourdes. I went with my mother and my grandmother - who was a very religious person - so it was a pilgrimage of sorts. I remember it as a very intense, but beautiful experience.

Andrea Bocelli

#91. Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

Federico Fellini

#92. I think most religious people experience just as much doubt as they do faith; they just don't admit it. (13)

Elna Baker

#93. It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to the term "scientific truth." So different is the meaning of the word "truth" according to whether we are dealing with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition or a scientific theory. "Religious truth" conveys nothing clear to me at all.

Albert Einstein

#94. Religious experience involves an encounter with the holy, the mystery of the totally other that opens like a chasm before humans in unexpected ways, making impossible the denial of its presence.

Luke Timothy Johnson

#95. Wine is a new drink," Dionysus explained. "But it's more than just a drink. It's a religious experience!

Rick Riordan

#96. Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.

Don DeLillo

#97. Thousands of people have entered churches without discovering a vital experience with Jesus Christ. The substitutes have been handed them in the guise of religious rituals, good works, community effort, or social reform ... none of which can gain a person a right relationship with God.

Billy Graham

#98. Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.

Ben Nicholson

#99. I live and die with the Indians. The first game I attended back in the mid-'90s was almost a religious experience. We were down by six and won by two, and it was glorious. The stadium is so beautiful, and the way it frames the city when you're sitting high above the second base line is spectacular.

Mary Doria Russell

#100. I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience, it just became one.

Lady Gaga