William James Quotes

I actually pray everyday, but I don't believe in God.

The spirituality that I experience sometimes touches on religion, in that I resonate with the thread of continuity that permeates through all religions. But in terms of it being a concretized, organized part of my life, it's not.

Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.

What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?

God is a feeling experience and not a believing experience. If your religion is a believing experience ... then that's not truly God.

Just because I don't harass it like some peoples us know don't mean I ain't got religion.

Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.

I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the right things--it's feelings. It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with math'matics--a man may be able to work problems straight off in's head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease.

I wasn't raised very religiously because my parents went to Catholic school, but I do believe in God very much. I just never gave God a name, if you know what I mean. I hope I haven't let Him down regardless.

I appreciate the idea of allowing people to have their own private walk with God. To me, God is about love, not condemnation.

I guess I stayed with the faith. I mean, organized religion is not something that I've maintained a direct connection to in my life, but the spirituality of it has had an indelible impact on my life and remains with me.

I participated in many different rituals, but for me, I'm very spiritual and I believe that there's definitely be a greater force that defines us and leads us. For sure. No question for me.

I really believe that God and religion is two different things.

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.

I am extremely spiritual. I've not gone into this before because it's personal, but faith is the core of my life.

I can't define "God," so to be open to the mystical and mystery of God is a natural part of myself. So people criticize me for not being what they are, and I say, it's working for me and has worked for me and continues to work for me, in a way that fills me with a sense of peace and contentment about what God means to me.

Me and Jesus got our own thing going on. We don't need anybody to tell us what it's all about.

Faith is not so much something we believe; faith is something we live.

Interest in religion is not necessarily interest in God. Religion in public life means a set of ideas, an ideology that has certain positions. Religion is then one more ideology among others. Religion is about God. Religion begins with a relationship to God, not a relationship to an idea. It is God who is an actor, not just individuals who have certain beliefs who are actors. God is an actor.

I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without - I was never really given a religion or a religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to.

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

The word 'christian' means different things to different people. To one person it means a stiff, upright, inflexible way of life, colorless and unbending. To another it means a risky, surprised-filled adventure, lived tiptoe at the edge of expectation...If we get our information from the biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.

If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not a believer. But if you mean that it is not all accidental, that there is a mystery to existence, a deeper meaning, that I do believe in.

I can tell you that God is alive because I talked to him this morning.