Various Thoughts on Religion

"One's religion is whatever he is most interested in."
--J.M. Barrie, The Twelve Pound Look (1910)

"The true laws of God are the laws of our own well-being."
--Samuel Butler, "Elementary Morality" (1912)

"Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion."
--Michel Guillaume De Crevecoeur, Letters from and American Farmer (1782)

"The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research."
--Albert Einstein, quoted in his obituary, April 19, 1955

"No man's religion ever survived his morals."
--English Proverb

The founders of the great world religions, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Lao-Tzu, Mohammed, all seem to have striven for a worldwide brotherhood of man; but none of them could develop institutions which would include the enemy, the unbeliever."
--Geoffrey Gorer, The New York Times Magazine, 11/27/66

"The garb of religion is the best cloak for power."
--William Hazlitt, "On the Clerical Character" (1819)

"I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance."
--Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (c. 1589)

"Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
--Karl Marx, Introduction to "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (1884)

"Knowledge and history are the enemies of religion."
--Napoleon I, Maxims (1804-15)

Emerson's Definition of Success

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson
(or at least it was attributed to him on the poster I saw; original source unknown)

The Wisdom of Emerson

"Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child."

"To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before and shall never be seen again."

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what other people think."

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."

"Discontent is the want of self reliance; it is infirmity of will."

"Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, various writings