Sigmund Freud Quotes

If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?

About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.

I'm very religious, you know. Now, OK, if by 'religious', you mean that I go to church every Sunday, read the bible faithfully, and I listen to Debbie Boone, umm, I'm not religious in that sense... But if by 'religious' you mean that I love others and try to help them whenever possible... Again, no. But if by 'religious' you mean that I like to eat coleslaw... Yeah, OK, OK!

They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.

I abandoned my religious teachings after I read the Bible twice - cover to cover. It took me a couple of years.

If you're denying God's power, that means you don't really believe they were miracles, and so then why believe they happened at all. What you're saying is you're taking the Bible's account as literally true in need of a scientific explanation rather than just people coming up with stuff to fulfill their religious missions.

If you asked me one day, I might say, "Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious." If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, "No."

If you take this life to be simply what old religious folks pretend (I mean the effete, gone to seed in a drought, mere human galls stung by the devil once), then all your joy and serenity is reduced to grinning and bearing it. The fact is, you have got to take the world on your shoulders like Atlas, and "put along" with it. You will do this for an idea's sake, and your success will be in proportion to your devotion to ideas. It may make your back ache occasionally, but you will have the satisfaction of hanging it or twirling it to suit yourself.

You cannot drag a man's conscience before any tribunal, and no one is answerable for his religious opinions to any power on earth.

If a religious person says "No, no, no" and they won't listen to science, it makes me think that they don't have faith in their own religion.

Miserable indeed is that religious teaching which calls itself Christian, and yet contains nothing of the cross.

On a personal note, myself, I find religion - I can understand it, I can understand why we have it, as a kind of force on the planet. And I also at the same time think it's ludicrous. My Latin education teaches me that religion comes from religio, which means, "to bind." To bind with rope. And that's all it means.

I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.

The liberal understanding of 'the separation of church and state' means that as the area of politics expands, the area of private freedom - religious and otherwise - shrinks.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the story isn't true, ... But what it does mean, then, is that at this moment we simply do not have enough evidence, in my view, for any conclusion to be reached - that the presidents have been lying to us for all these years and that what we've been told was just a pack of lies.

...the tale that's told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that's told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.

I am a very curious person; I'll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.

To remain attached to the temporal, to the changing is to remain within the world of misery because the temporal will be taken away. You have invested so much in it but one day everything is taken away. Then it is natural to feel miserable. Misery is rooted in attachment to the body and bliss is rooted in non-attachment to the body; hence all the great masters have been teaching methods and means of non-attachment, of getting disidentified with the body, with the mind, with everything surrounds you, and of just remaining a pure witness. That's what we are: pure witnessing, pure awareness.

In 1962 (Engel v. Vitale), the Supreme Court explained that the word 'church' would no longer mean a federally established denomination; it would now mean a religious activity in public.

Is it at all surprising that the number of those who hold the opinions of the Church in light esteem should so rapidly increase? How can that be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?

I hope for an America where no president, no public official, no individual will ever be deemed a greater or lesser American because of religious doubt - or religious belief.

All scientists should be skeptics. The reason why is that, even with the best of scientific measurements, we can come up with all kinds of explanations of what those measurements mean in terms of cause and effect, and yet most of those explanations are wrong. It's really easy to be wrong in science ... it's really hard to be right.

How anyone can remain a Catholic - I mean who has ever been aroused to think, and is not biased by the partialities of childish years - after seeing Catholicism here in Italy I cannot conceive.