"Men despise religion. They hate it, and fear it is true"
- Blaise Pascal, "Pensees"
"No man has ever seen God or known him, but God has revealed himself to us through faith, by which alone it is possible to see him"
- Anonymous, Letter to Diognetus
"Men are not on such intimate terms with the sublime that they really can believe in it"
- Soren Kierkegaard
"Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world"
- Terry Eagleton
"It has been one of the defects of theologians at all times to over-estimate the importance of our planet"
- Bertrand Russell
"Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity"
- Sigmund Freud
"I assure you that it is not by faith that you will come to know him, but by love; not by mere conviction, but by action"
- Gregory the Great
"We must go forth into God with a faith that is far above our reason, and there dwell, simple, idle, without image, lifted up by love"
- John Ruusbroeck
"If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity"
- Karl Barth
"Man is a five-foot worm"
- John Calvin
"This atheism concerning the gods of men pertains hereafter to any possible faith"
- Paul Ricoeur
"Man makes religion, religion does not make man"
- Karl Marx
"The watch must have had a maker"
- William Paley
"It would be superfluous to receive by faith, things that can be known by natural reason"
- Thomas Aquinas
"Believers who have formulated such proofs [for God's existence] ... would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
"In Him there is no room for non-existence or imperfection"
- Mulla Sadra
"The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events"
- Edward Gibbon
"To be faithful in prayer it is indispensable that we arrange all the activities of the day with a regularity that nothing can disturb"
- Francois Fenelon
"We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation"
- Thomas Merton
"One of the most evil dispositions possible is that which satirizes and turns everything to ridicule. God abhors this vice, and has sometimes punished it in a marked manner"
- Francis de Sales
"One who views thing as they are in reality, and not as they are said or thought to be, is truly wise, taught by God rather than by other persons"
- Thomas a Kempis
"Our hearts are restless until they rest in you"
- Augustine of Hippo
"To minds tormented by the divine thirst, it is useless to offer the most certain knowledge of the laws of numbers and the arrangement of the universe"
- Etienne Gilson
"Humility … is nothing else but a true knowledge of yourself as you are"
- The Cloud of Unknowing
"In discussing the behavior of quarks ... physicists can sound more like theologians than the sober guardians of a rigorous 'hard' science"
- Kathleen Norris ("Acedia & Me")
"The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind"
- Ayn Rand ("Atlas Shrugged")
"If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us”
- Blaise Pascal ("Pensees")
"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one"
- Marcus Aurelius
"Does there exist a single instance of a saint asserting that he himself possessed the gift of miracles?"
- Edward Gibbon
"Let reason, the gift divine, be your highest guide"
- "The Golden Verses of Pythagoras"
"God and nature create nothing that does not fulfill a purpose"
- Aristotle
"Human reason has the peculiar fate ... that it is burdened with questions that it cannot dismiss ... but which it also cannot answer"
- Immanuel Kant
"Wisdom is in a certain sense attained when you believe in the invisible without first demanding to understand it. God must be believed in as he is, that is, as being invisible; even though he can be partly seen by a pure heart"
- St Columbanus, Abbot
"For much of human history, [religion] may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
"Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God"
- Tertullian
"If the world is founded on reason, wisdom and science, and is filled with orderly beauty, then it must owe its origin and order to none other than the Word of God"
- Athanasius of Alexandria
Speaking of Augustine’s definition of “faith,” I was enjoying Angels & Demons on this Easter Sunday and ran across a remarkably orthodox formulation, delivered by renowned symbologist Robert Langdon (aka Tom Hanks) to the interim Pope character played by a dashing Ewan McGregor.
