Thomas Jefferson Quotes

These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

Credo quia absurdum – I believe because it is absurd.

I hold that religion and faith are two different things.

Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.

I'm very passionate about philosophy and religion.

Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.

Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.

I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

I think people can believe in anything.

I would say I have a complicated relationship with institutionalized religion.

Religion is not a conclusion of the reason.

Religion has nothing to do with spirituality.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

I am fascinated with religion or things that people believe in and question that. I think it's interesting.

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me purely factitious, fabricated on the one hand by short-sighted religious people, who confound ... theology with religion; and on the other by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension.

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

A scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....

In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt.

The basis of religion is independent of science. Theology, not religion, is the antithesis to science

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.