Mark Twain Quotes

Religion can be one of the greatest impediments to finding God.

We treasure the word of God not only by reading the words of the scriptures, but by studying them. We may be nourished more by pondering a few words, allowing the Holy Ghost to make them treasures to us, than to pass quickly and superficially over whole chapters of scripture.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.

I do not purpose to discuss faith in its dogmatic sense today.

On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them.

You should never trust the experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man.

If the word of God and scholarship disagree, then to Hell with scholarship!

Religion in its essence requires theological arrogance.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

Religion was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were taught in all the other classes.

Generally speaking, the Smritikars never care to explain the why and the how of their dogmas.

I don't care whether the people believe me to be a prophet, seer, or revelator or not - I have been very profitable to this people, and I have seen a good many things, and I have revealed many things.

A lot of people have a belief system that is strictly based on religious dogma.

All religions are, in some basic sense, irrational.

God may not explain Himself, but He will reveal Himself.

In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.

I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.

Christianity is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it.

Chrysostom, I remember, mentions a twofold book of God: the book of the creatures, and the book of the scriptures. God, having taught us first of all by his works, did it afterwards, by his Words. We will now for a while read the former of these books; 'twill help us in reading the latter. They will admirably assist one another.

Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

I am an atheist... I don't understand religion at all. I'm sure I'll offend a lot of people by saying this, but I think it's all nonsense.

What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.

I would beg the wise and learned fathers [of the church] to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration.