Quotes about Religion

Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, 'My life for your life.

Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state'... is absolutely essential in a free society.

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method.

When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.

Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.

Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew.

As long as man sees religion as a source of satisfaction for his own needs, it is not God whom he serves but his own self.

This was a religious problem, my father felt; people can want to be deceived. Do not deceive, the Kotzker rebbe insisted, and that also means do not deceive oneself by being gullible.

The true goal for man is to be what he does. The worth of a religion is the worth of the individuals living it. A mitsvah, therefore, is not mere doing but an act that embraces both the doer and the deed. The means may be external, but the end is personal. Your deeds be pure, so that ye shall be holy. A hero is he who is greater than his feats, and a pious man is he who is greater than his rituals. The deed is definite, yet the task is infinite.

It has not only detested beauty when produced at the price of justice; it has rejected the ritual when performed by the morally corrupted. Even religion itself, worship, was not considered to be an absolute. "Your prayers are an abomination," said Isaiah to the exploiters of the poor. Stay away from the synagogue, wrote the Gaon of Wilna to his household, if you cannot abstain from envy and gossiping about the dresses of your fellow attendants.

To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care.