Religion

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."

"No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer."And what is hell? Can you tell me that"A pit full of fire."And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever"No, sir."What must you do to avoid it"I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: "I must keep in good health and not die."

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off."

"Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car."

"Religious people fear hell -- Spiritual people have walked thru it."

"Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back."

"I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world."

"Men take care not to make women weep, for God counts their tears."

"In order to know who you are you need to know God is."

"I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words."

"I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All."

"He who defends with love will be secure; Heaven will save him, and protect him with love."

"Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar."

"I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed."

"If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it."

"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons."

"There is nothing more important than your eternal salvation."

"Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there."

"Forgive me for being so ordinary while claiming to know so extraordinary a God."