Samuel Johnson Quotes

I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.

Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.

My dear, be a good man be virtuous be religious be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here. ...God bless you all.

A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce.

If God cared only about religious activities, then the Pharisees would have been heroes of the faith.

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

I am a very religious person, so it is the presence of God, the constant unwavering, unrelenting presence of God which continues to help me to keep a character which I am proud to show.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

I like to read a couple books at once. I was reading the Princess Diana book. I'm reading a book about Chicago and the mob. Right now I'm also reading the Bible, beginning to end. I'm very religious. That's how I've gotten to where I am.

All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.

Let us read our Bibles reverently and diligently, with an honest determination to believe and practice all we find in them.

Religion was important to me. My family and I were very religious. I acctualy believe the work I did was a calling from God himself.

I had quite a religious upbringing. I gave my life over to Christ at 11. I took it back when I was about 14.

They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.

In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.

I'm Catholic, and my wife is Catholic. We're very religious. We go to church. We pray every night. We pray at dinner. To me, Catholics regard themselves as very Christian. Some Christians view Catholics as not necessarily Christian.

A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation

Read the Bible, read the Bible! Let no religious book take its place. Through all my perplexities and distresses, I seldom read any other book, and I as rarely felt the want of any other.

Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.

If you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.

There are so many people who are clever. There are 8000 people at Princeton who are more clever than the three of us at this table. BUT, we have the ability to give something that they don't have...which is us.

Man, being not only a religious, but also a social being, requires for the promotion of his rational happiness religious institutions, which, while they give a proper direction to devotion, at the same time make a wise and profitable improvement of his social feelings.

The Lordship of Jesus Christ is not quite forgotten among Christians, but it has been relegated to the hymnal where all responsibility toward it may be comfortably discharged in a glow of religious emotion. Or if it is taught as a theory in the classroom it is rarely applied to practical living. The idea that the Man Christ Jesus has absolute final authority over the whole church and over its members in every detail of their lives is simply not now accepted as true by the rank and file of evangelical Christians.

Intelligence is almost useless to the person whose only quality it is.

We leaders should leave the tradition that we have become crazy for God.