Aldous Huxley Quotes

The older I get, the more I realize that religion is not going to be easily marginalized by one of its wannabe successors - science, capitalism, consumerism.

I needed a lot of the good things that church provided. But as I grew older, it became increasingly hard for me to rationalize the importance of church in my life with the beliefs that it required that were at odds with modern science.

Religion can have psychological and social roles, but in terms of really explaining how things work, science works differently. Science is based on material elements at the core.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

All too often, the word 'religion' has become identified with those promoting a frankly anti-scientific view of nature and of our place in the natural world.

The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.

God save us from religion.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

… religion is poison

In my own life, my science and my religion are separate.

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God.

Some people pray to a totem pole, some people pray to a sun, some people pray to a god. It all works for them. It all comes back to what you think.

Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

Evolution seems to close the heart to some of the plainest spiritual truths while it opens the mind to the wildest guesses advanced in the name of science.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.

In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual'; I thought it was all crap.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

I'm not Catholic. I don't believe in God. But at the same time, I'm obsessed by the sacred, by spirituality. The question of redemption has been present well before Christianity, but as French people are a bit stupid, they see all that in religious terms.

I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views.