Robert Mapplethorpe Quotes

I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.

I was an altar boy, I took catechism classes and religion classes, and I prayed a lot as a child. My family was very religious, and I really experienced God.

I grew up as a Roman Catholic, and as a very young boy I felt the presence of divinity in my life through the experiences that I had in connection with the Catholic church.

Every day before supper and before we went to services on Sundays. My grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton in the fields. Prayer and the Bible, became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put my trust in God and to seek Him as my strength.

I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic school for 12 years.

From a young age, I saw and placed importance on spirituality within religion.

Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.

I was raised Catholic and I have a lot of respect for the good in the Catholic Church. But I don't go to church.

Icons are also beautiful, with their luminous colors and gold leaf. On first glance, the subjects can seem flat, their poses artificial. But the wonder of the icons has to do with the relationship which develops between the panel and the viewer. Looking at an icon brings me a feeling of serenity; it's like a form of prayer. So I suppose in this sense, the icon is unsurpassed.

When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.

I don't go to church on Sunday, don't get on my knees to pray, or memorize the books of the Bible, I got my own special way

I was born and raised in the University of Chicago area and had an uneventful middle-class Catholic childhood. I had a heavy Catholic upbringing and Catholicism is terrible - it's the reason there were slaves. Mass every morning at seven o'clock during Lent. It's a totally negative, man-made religion.

I used to go to church when I was younger. My parents didn't go to church, but my friends all went to church and I loved going to church - I would go every Sunday with somebody. My parents used to think it was funny.

I went every Sunday to church when I was growing up, and I think that music had an affect on me before my memory can recall.

I was raised in the church by my grandmother who made sure we went to Sunday School, read the Bible and went to church every Sunday. Every night we read Bible stories before we went to bed.

I was born into a Catholic family. I grew up in West Belfast. Faith was very important to us eight children and my mother and father. It was grounded in the Christian tradition of social involvement.

Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.

In our family, at this point,[Sunday School] its not a choice for my kids. It's a duty for us as parents to give them faith as a foundation and hope that when they bemuse older teens and young adults they will choose the same thing for themselves.

I owe a great deal to the church for everything in which I believe. I am very glad that I was brought up strictly. I was a very serious child. There was not a lot of fun and sparkle in my life.

I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids.

For millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

As a matter of fact my, my very first time singing when I was two and a half, three, was in church. So, ahm, church is very, very much a part of who I am.

The religion of the Bible is the best in the world. I see the infinite value of religion. Let it be always encouraged. A world ofsuperstition and folly have grown up around its forms and ceremonies. But the truth in it is one of the deep sentiments in human nature.

Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.