Quotes by British Authors - Page 729

Indeed taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it.
Brooke Foss Westcott
A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious.
David Brazier
I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.
Dorothy L. Sayers
All religions are beautiful in the story, as you say. It's when they're put into practice that they grow ugly.
Michael Arditti
To be frank, I find religion rather offensive.
Terry Pratchett
To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist.
Terry Pratchett
Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.
Terry Pratchett
Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.
Bede Griffiths
Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.
Bede Griffiths
As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.
Michael Palin
He wondered reflectively what would happen if you asked a nun where the Gents was. Probably the Pope sent you a sharp note or something.
Neil Gaiman
Ankh-Morpork is a godless city--''I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?' said Maladict. city', he recovered.
Terry Pratchett
The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.
Arthur C. Clarke
It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.
Christopher Hitchens
The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
Diane Setterfield
No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
First the priests arrive. Then the conquistadores.
James Clavell
But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.
William Blake
Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
Philip Pullman
Three ThingsThree things cannot be retrieved:The arrow once sped from the bowThe word spoken in hasteThe missed opportunity.(Ali the Lion, Caliph of Islam, son-in-law of Mohammed the Prophet),
Idries Shah
You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.'Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.
W Somerset Maugham
Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
C.S. Lewis
It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing' people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.
Terry Pratchett
The prince's official job description as king will be 'defender of the faith,' which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.
Christopher Hitchens
...The Qur'an cannot be translated. ...The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur'an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Qur'an-and peradventure something of the charm in English. It can never take the place of the Qur'an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so...
Marmaduke William Pickthall
But you must still know to respect other people's faith.''Why? We don't respect any other delusion. We lock up people who believe they're Christ, yet we're supposed to humour those who believe in him.''By definition, faith is irrational: a belief you hold against the normal rules of evidence.''In which case I believe in Jedi
Michael Arditti
All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.
N.T. Wright
I had retained little of what is generally called religion, except for a visceral conviction that our lives are controlled by some universal mechanism that is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that was what others called God. Perhaps not.
Michael Cox
If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official "Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.
C.S. Lewis
The Devil answer'd: bray a fool in a morter with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defense before Pilate? covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.
William Blake
The Church of England is the only church in the world that interferes neither with your politics nor your religion
Anthony Trollope
It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.
Christopher Hitchens
I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.
John Henry Newman
I’m an atheist, and a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation.
Daniel Radcliffe
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
G.K. Chesterton
I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.
Christopher Hitchens
The problem I have with all this religion stuff is that I can't relate to it. I think most people got into 'cos it gave them something to do on a Sunday, but since all the shops are now open it isn't required as much.
Karl Pilkington
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
Virginia Woolf
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
Richard Dawkins
Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.
C.J. Sansom
I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.
Karen Armstrong
Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
Neil Gaiman
Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot.
Terry Pratchett
Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?
Christopher Hitchens
When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.
Terry Pratchett
I have always been resistant to doctrine, and any spirituality I had experienced thus far in my life had been much more abstract and not aligned with any recognized religion. For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious.
Eric Clapton
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
C.S. Lewis
Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.
Douglas Adams
At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.
Banksy
Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.
Christopher Hitchens
We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.
Michael Polanyi
Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.
D.H. Lawrence
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
William Blake
Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy.
Abdal Hakim Murad
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.'Rose didn't answer the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.
Graham Greene
I don't think it's possible to c-call yourself a C-Christian and... and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' -Wilfred Owen
Pat Barker
When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.
Salman Rushdie