Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in.

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.

Hinduism is not a codified 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.

The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin.

I was raised Jewish. I didn't know anything about Christianity.

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

My mother was sort of mildly religious, but the rest of us, you know, we didn't really have it forced on us.

I love religion. I could make up religions all day. I sort of think that in an ideal world I'd like to be a religion designer. I'd like people come up to me and say, I need a religion. I'd go talk to them for a while, and I'd design a religion for them. That would be a great job. There's a need for people like that. Fortunately, seeing that one can't actually do it, I get paid for sort of making them up anyway.

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.

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.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

I'm very interested in religion and different religions, and I know quite a lot about it. I love gospel music, and I love going to churches, but the one drawback is that I don't actually believe in God. And it is quite a handicap, you know.

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.

The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.

... in Northern Ireland, if you don't have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

Every once in a while I check and I say, do I still believe in God? And the answer is absolutely yes. And then I think, I suppose I should go to church now. But after going to so many churches in my life and trying to go with the flow with so many denominations, Eastern and Western, I don't really feel I need to go to church at all.

My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you believe in God?

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.

If Vulcans had a church, they’d be Catholics.

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.