Religion and Spirituality

"God is not dead but alive and well and working on a far less ambitious project."

Anonymous

"Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw. Can you fly in the air? You have done no better than a bluebottle. Conquer your heart; then you may become somebody."

Ansari of Herat

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought."

Basho

"Perhaps the saddest thing to admit is that those who rejected the Cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it so often engaged in crucifying others."

Nicholai Aleksandrovich Berdyayev

"If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."

Fedor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways', Yossarian continued 'There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverencce can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'"

Joseph Heller, Catch 22

"True and false are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood."

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

"If there is no God, who pops up the next kleenex?"

Art Hoppe

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

"I know I believe in nothing, but it's my nothing"

Richey James, Faster

"The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon."

Franz Kafka

"If you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

Friedrich Nietsche, Beyond Good and Evil

"Jesus died too soon. He would have repudiated his doctrine if he had lived to my age."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

"God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft

"I look to God but the sky is empty."

Sylvia Plath, Thanks Rosie / Manics

"To understand everything is to hate nothing."

Romain Rolland

"Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

Bertrand Russell, An outline of Intellectual Rubbish

"Hell is other people."

John-Paul Sartre, No Exit For Steph King

"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."

Marylin vos Savant

"In the beginning, there was nothing. Then God said "Let there be light," and there was still nothing, but you could see it."

Dave Thomas

"The secret source of humour itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven."

Mark Twain

"God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shines through."

Paul Valery

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

Voltaire

"If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment."

Voltaire