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

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
— C.S. Lewis

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
— Albert Einstein

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
— C.S. Lewis

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."
— C.S. Lewis

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them."
— Philip Pullman

"How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!"
— Benjamin Franklin

"Music is my higher power"
— Oliver James

"It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence."
— C.S. Lewis

"The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive."
— Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation)

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere."
— Voltaire

"I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time.
She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic."
— Woody Allen

"Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."
— Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

"A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."
— C.S. Lewis

"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court."
— Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)

"I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.
Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm."
— Robert Farrar Capon

"I am a religious person, although I am not a believer."
— Philip Pullman

"Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God."
— John Piper

"The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation."
— Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)

"Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup -- of everyone's psychological makeup."
— Philip Pullman

"The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion."
— Ambrose Bierce

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
— Thomas Jefferson, circa 1781

"God is the supreme uncreated light of which Wisdom is born, but there was never a time when God's Wisdom did not exist."
— Merritt Y. Hughes (Ten Perspectives on Milton)

"Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other."
— Neil Postman (The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School)

"Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires." "
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human)

"Unless you thought that Jews just couldn't eat bacon, like pork disagrees with us...Moses came down the mountain with dietary advice. 'People of Israel! You can, but I wouldn't.'"
— Matt Kirshen

"Reason excludes faith," Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. "It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that."
— Mark Helprin

"And then I stand in front of God's Throne squinting up at His blazing glory and He says, 'You had your opportunities, boy. But did you listen? No. You went on heedlesly reading that garbagey magazine with pictures of naked girls in it. How juvenile! I gave geese more sense than that.'

Please, God. I'm only fourteen years old. A teenager. Have mercy. Be loving.

'I was,' says God. 'For eons. And look at what it got me. You.'

God turns in disgust, just the way Daddy does. 'Sorry, but I'm the Creator. I take it personally. There are slugs and bugs and night-crawlers I feel better about having created - I mean, there are sparrows - I've got my eye on one right now. Is that sparrow consumed with lust? No. He mates in the spring and that's the end of it. Consider the lilies. Do they think about lily tits all the time? No. They look not and they lust not, and yet I say unto you that you will never be half as attractive as they. Therefore, I say unto you, think not about peckers and boobs and all that nonsense and your Heavenly Father will see that you meet a good woman and marry her, just as I do for the sparrow and walleye - yea verily, even the night-crawler and the eelpout. But I've told you this over and over for nineteen centuries. And now, verily, it's too late. Time's up, buster. Lights out! Game's over!'"
— Garrison Keillor

"As most men are fettered by bonds of tradition and by imitating the ways followed by their fathers, ancestors, relatives, and acquaintances; everyone continues, without investigating the arguments and reasons, to follow the religion in which he was born and educated thus excluding himself from the possibility of ascertaining the truth, which is the noblest aim of the human intellect. THEREFORE, WE, associate at convenient seasons with learned men of all religions [and of no religion], thus deriving profit from their exquisite discourses and exalted aspirations."
— Akbar, 1582 (Emperor of Muhgal Empire/Inida)

""I used to think that kid might become a preacher. Now I don't see how he's going to stay out of prison. Nobody in this family ever went to prison for sex crimes. He'd be the first."

"Yes," says Jesus, "you never know about these things."

He and Grandpa are drinking cups of coffee and eating ginger snaps. Grandpa says, "When are you planning to return to earth?"

"Soon as I finish this coffee," say Jesus. "Pretty good, isn't it.""
— Garrison Keillor

"As every inquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning it origin in human nature."
— David Hume (The Natural History of Religion)