Sin is a gravitation.

We, ignorant of ourselves,Beg often our own harms, which the wise powersDeny us for our good; so find we profitBy losing of our prayers.

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the...

You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you...

The reverend waited for her to be seated and then he bowed his head and blessed the food and the table and the people sitting at it. He went on at some length and blessed everything all the way up to...

He, Cromwell, says to his visitors, just tell them this, and tell them loud: to each monk, one bed: to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them?

Do you believe in God, doctor?No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.

My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously{...} I experienced the guilt complex as...

The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and...

Faith is a fine inventionWhen gentlemen can see

I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.' 'That's also prayer.' He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. 'The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line,...

But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was,...

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into...

Science destroys only the false ideas about religion; the true ideas it complements and explores.}

But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

His point, again and again, was that truth wasn't the property of any one faith and that, if you looked closely, you found a ground where they all converged.

No child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in.

When you are singled out for torture because of your faith, can religion still be a beacon?

This is the lesson we learned from everything that happened -- there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us. What if it was a challenge of your faith? I said. I could...

Objects that don't exist don't exist. If we were to imagine such a thing as an object that didn't exist, it would be that thing that God hated. This is the strongest argument against the nonbeliever....

When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends...

I think it {religion} is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.

I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, {in the schoolyard}. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated...

Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers.

They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred...

Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted {us}? He is...

I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. , for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the...

You were baptized?My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it. The Bishop...