In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.
— Mysticism and Logic
Quotes About Religion
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
— Questions sur les Miracles à M. Claparede, Professeur de Théologie à Genève, par un Proposant: Ou Extrait de Diverses Lettres de M. de Voltaire
Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
— Songs of Innocence and of Experience
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
— Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
— The Prague Cemetery
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
— Confessions
...[T]hese people... are my dangerous accusers because those who hear them suppose that anyone who inquires into such matters... theories about the heavens... and everything below the earth... must be an atheist.
— Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates.
I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.
— The Aleph and Other Stories
Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind.
— Theological-Political Treatise
As every inquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning it origin in human nature.
— The Natural History of Religion
From the house of unbeliefto true religionis a single breath; From the world of doubtto certaintyis a single breath; Enjoy this precious single breath, for the harvestof our whole livesis that same one breath.
— Quatrains - Ballades
When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.
— The Story of My Experiments With Truth
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
— A Memorial and Remonstrance, on the Religious Rights of Man: Written in 1784-85
This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.
— Opticks
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians.
We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.
— The Idiot
God's dialogue with us becomes truly human, since God conducts his part as man.
— Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life
For what is truth? In matters of relogion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
— The Critic as Artist
What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!
— The Anti-Christ/Ecce Homo/Twilight of the Idols/Other Writings
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
— Notebooks 1951-1959
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence -- these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.
— The World As I See It
What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?
— Philosophical Dictionary