T. S. Eliot Quotes

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.

Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

I'm not religious. I was as a child, and like lots of people, I suppose, rapidly became very disillusioned with the whole thing. I also feel that organised religion has caused far more problems than it has solved.

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

I grew up very religious, and I don't have a great relationship with religion.

Faith is important to me. It's important to millions of Australians. It helps to shape who I am. It helps to shape my values. But it must never, never dictate my politics.

I've never had any religion. I'd prefer it if I did, really. Even as a boy I just couldn't make myself believe.

Now celebrity has taken on a holy status all of its own, and we look to the stars to provide us with the transcendental experience that was once achieved through religion.

I believed in God my whole life, and then strayed away from it in my teen-age years, until recently.

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

Young people all over the world are very frustrated. They are very disillusioned. Many of them are turning their backs on religion. They are walking away from the faith of their parents, and most of this is because religion has failed them.

You believe in God, then you don't believe anymore and when you have a big problem, you pray anyway.

I say I haven't lost my religion. I've lost my ideology.

It's hard to say, 'I don't believe in God.' I would love to know if God exists. But it's a very difficult thing for me to believe.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.

Intuitive faith and reasoned judgment are not the same. Spirit is not always thought. But, in the everyday business of living, secular or otherwise, these variant aspects of personality find inseparable expression in a thousand ways. They cannot be altogether parted in law more than in life.

It's not religion that's the problem - it's the lack of religion!

Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.

Come take a look at one of the oldest human urges- religion. After all, the only thing that makes us screwier is sex.

I cannot have God in my heart if he is not in my head. Before I can believe in, I must believe that.