Quotes of faith

Quotes of faith

Prayer is a concentration of positive thought. —Peace Pilgrim, Her Life
and Work
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all
there is in a language he has barely mastered. —Leonard Cohen, “F.,”
Beautiful Losers, 1970

Asked if she worshiped regularly: Honey, at my age, I don’t do anything
regularly. —Selma Diamond, Funny Women, Unterbrink

When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I
realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, doesn’t work that way. So I just
stole one and asked him to forgive me! —Emo Philips, stand-up routine,  

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe
be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner
confessedly unworthy.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906

The Soul unto itself / Is an imperial friend— / Or the most agonizing
Spy— / An Enemy—could send —Emily Dickinson, No. 683, Poems,
Johnson
What soul is without flaws? —Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, 1873

Go out and be born among gypsies or thieves or among happy worka-
day people who live with the sun and do not think about their souls.
—Pearl S. Buck, “Advice to Unborn Novelists,” 1949

Spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational. —Sam Harris,
The End of Faith, 2005

He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there
was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always
included service to others. —Isabel Allende, Daughter of Fortune, 1999

I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into
a small thimble, and found room to move there—wide room. —Olive
Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 1883

A single Screw of Flesh / Is all that pins the Soul —Emily Dickinson,
No. 262, Poems, Johnson

Of the enemies of the soul— / the world, the devil, the flesh— / the
world is the most serious and most dangerous. —Gabriela Mistral, “We
Were All to Be Queens,” Felling, 1938

His soul is about the size of a toenail. —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Eye of
the Heron, 1978

We will try to be holy, / We will try to repair the world given to us to
hand on. / Precious is this treasure of words and knowledge and deeds /
that moves inside us. —Marge Piercy, The Art of Blessing the Day, 1999

In essence, the search of so many people today for the mystical wisdom
of an earlier time is the search for the kind of spirituality characteristic
of a partnership rather than a dominator society. —Riane Eisler, The
Chalice and the Blade, 1994

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself
are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to
the merest puff.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof—that’s a drink that only the
most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. —Aldous Huxley,
Island, 1962

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more
certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not
lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but
through striving after rational knowledge. —Albert Einstein, Out of My
Later Years, 1950

The difference between science and religion is the difference between
a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new argu-
ments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. —Sam Harris, Article
in The Huffington Post, 2006

The soul can split the sky in two, / And let the face of God shine
through. —Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence,” 1917

Everyone’s conscience in religion is between God and themselves, and
it belongs to none other. —Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, 166

her awful Mate / The Soul cannot be rid —Emily
Dickinson, No. 894, Poems, Johnson

To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal
Opposition.
—Woody Allen, Stardust Memories, 1980

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have
given us religion. —Martin Amis, article in The Guardian (London),
2002

Religion has become so pallid recently, it is hardly worthwhile being an
atheist. —Paddy Chayefsky, The Tenth Man, 1959

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the
rest of the week. —Alice Walker, letter to the editor, Ms. (1974), In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 1983

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a
person’s life. —Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 2005

Why is it more ridiculous to arraign ecclesiastics for their false teach-
ing and acts of injustice to women, than members of Congress and the
House of Commons? —Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible,
1895

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny
way to heaven, / Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, / Himself
the primrose path of dalliance treads. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet,
1600

Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the tempo-
ral power should not become too important in any Church. —Eleanor
Roosevelt, letter to Cardinal Francis Spellman (1949), quoted by Joseph
P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 1972

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