Mark Twain Quotes

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

All too willingly man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error and remain deaf to the wisest command ever given by a sage, the famous "Know thyself" inscribed in the temple of Delphi.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

I believe it's my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.

The modern position seems only another manifestation of egotism, which develops when man has reached a point at which he will no longer admit the rights to existence of things not of his own contriving.

The love of God is not taught. No one has taught us to enjoy the light or to be attached to life more than anything else. And no one has taught us to love the two people who brought us into the world and educated us. Which is all the more reason to believe that we did not learn to love God as a result of outside instruction. In the very nature of every human being has been sown the seed of the ability to love. You and I ought to welcome this seed, cultivate it carefully, nourish it attentively and foster its growth by going to the school of God's commandments with help of His grace.

Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.

Jesus left a long time ago, said he would return. He left us a book to believe in, in it we've got an awful lot to learn.

It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

In the past few months I've become religious, I've started to believe in god, creationism and intelligent design, and the reason that I now believe in god and creationism and intelligent design is because of Professor Richard Dawkins. Because when I look at something as complex and intricate and beautiful as Professor Richard Dawkins, I don't think that just could've evolved by chance! Professor Richard Dawkins was put there by god to test us, like fossils. And facts.

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

Man has always seen himself the peak of creation. The part of the universe that thinks. The purpose for it all. It's no doubt a gratifying view, but the universe may have a different opinion.

I think enormous harm is done by religion - not just in the name of religion, but actually by religion. ... Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.

I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.' That's just a long-winded religious way to say 'Shut up.'

It is impossible for human nature to believe that money is not there. It seems so much more likely that the money is there and only needs bawling for.

I'm not really a religious person. But I believe that God wants me to do something and it has to do with Thug Life.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

What you've got here is really a case of journalists making fun of people who believe in God and the devil.