The purpose of religion is to help the individual to orient constructively
with both the visible and the invisible worlds in which he functions.
-Manly Hall

The essential meaning of every religion is to answer the question
"Why do I live, and what is my attitude
to the limitless world which surrounds me?"
There is not a single religion,
from the most sophisticated to the most primitive,
which does not have as its basis
the definition of this attitude of a person to the world.
-Leo Tolstoy

Religion is the vision of something which stands
beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things;
something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized;
something which is a remote possibility,
and yet the greatest of present facts;
something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension;
something whose possession is the final good,
and yet is beyond all reach;
something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.
-Alfred North Whitehead

The fundamental intention of every religion or wisdom is the following:
first, is discernment between the real and the unreal,
and then concentration upon the real.
One could also render this intention otherwise:
truth and the way, prajna and upaya,
doctrine and its corresponding method.
-Frithjof Schuon

The purpose of any established religion (including tribal cults)
is to glorify, sanction and bless with a superpersonal meaning
all personal and interpersonal activities.
-Dane Rudhyar

Religion has to do with creating a power in man,
a kind of shining armor,
which prohibits the entry of negative factors.

-Manly Hall

The functions of a true religion
are to help man live continually on the path,
and to live on the path more and more perfectly.
-Christian Larson

The aim of all religions is the same.
It is the reunion of the self-conscious
with the supreme principle of consciousness and being
which is know metaphysically as the One and religiously as God.
-Hugh l'Anson Fausset

What is religion?
It is the investigation, with all one's attention.
with the summation of all one's energy,
to find that which is sacred,
to come upon that which is holy.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sacredness is the essence of religion.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices
relative to sacred things.
-Emile Durkheim

It [religion] is the truth of our complete being,
the consciousness of our personal relationship with the Infinite.
-Rabindranath Tagore

My religion is the reconciliation
of the Super-personal Man,
the Universal human spirit,
in my own individual being.
-Rabindranath Tagore

True religion is a coupling of the mundane and the spiritual
in a healthy symbiosis.
-Paul Wright

Religion is realization; not talk, not doctrine,
not theories however beautiful they might be.
It is being and becoming, not hearing and acknowledging;
it is the whole soul becoming changed into what it believes.
-Vivekananda

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully
gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it;
and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems,
but must always be undergoing modification.
-D. H. Lawrence

Although mankind is the same everywhere,
a man's religion is his experience in life,
and therefore his own evolution.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man
even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.
-Mohandas Gandhi

Say nothing of my religion.
It is known to God and myself alone.
Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life...
-Thomas Jefferson

Make sure that your religion
is a matter between you and God only.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Music is my religion.
-Jimi Hendrix

The artist needs no religion beyond his work.
-Elbert Hubbard

Religion is not a department of life;
it is something that enters into the whole of it.
-Alan Watts

True religion is real living;
living with all one's soul,
with all one's goodness and righteousness.
-Albert Einstein

A good life is the only religion.
-Thomas Fuller

Your work in life must be your religion,
whatever your occupation may be.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Religion is to do right.
It is to love, it is to serve,
it is to think, it is to be humble.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I do good, I feel good;
when I do bad, I feel bad.
That's my religion.
-Abraham Lincoln

The only religion is conscience in action.
-Henry Demarest Lloyd

My religion is not deceiving myself.

-Milarepa

My religion is to live and die without regret.
-Milarepa

There is but one religion, the religion of Truth.
-James Allen

My religion is based on truth and non-violence.
Truth is my God.
Non-violence is the means of realising Him.
-Mohandas Gandhi

My country is the world
and my religion is to do good.
-Thomas Paine

There is no higher religion than human service.
To work for the common good is the greatest creed.
-Albert Schweitzer

My religion is very simple.
My religion is kindness.
-Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama

Natural religion
is the religion of beauty.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Religion is, at it were,
the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point,
which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all -
that has been my religion.
-John Burroughs

Love is my religion.
-John Keats

Love is the cheapest of religions.
-Cesare Pavese

What I've found is that the religion that matters,
the real religion, is love.
-Muhammed Ali

My religion is love to all living beings.
-Leo Tolstoy

I can't see (or feel) the conflict between love and religion.
To me they're the same thing.
-Elizabeth Bowen

Every religion has the wholesome core 

of love, compassion and good will.

-Ashoka

Religion is the feeling
of sacredness, of compassion, of love.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti

Purity is the very essence of religion.
-Sivananda

True religion is the inner light about all else.

-Eliphas Levi

Identification with the Light
is seen to be a basic truth common to all religions.
-Sivananda Radha

True religion is universal and eternal.
It is life and truth, existence itself...
The universal religion is the universal consciousness and love.
-David Frawley

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message,
that is love, compassion and forgiveness...
the important things is they should be part of our daily lives.
-Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama

I believe in the fundamental truth
of all great religions of the world.
-Mohandas Gandhi

My religion enables me, obliges me to imbibe all that is good
in all the great religions of the earth.
-Mohandas Gandhi

I am thankful I can see much to admire
in all religions.
-Alfred Russel Wallace

A profound understanding of religions
allows the destruction of the barriers that separate them.
-Mohandas Gandhi

The essence of all religions is one.
Only their approaches are different.
-Mohandas Gandhi

Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams -
they all have different names - but they all contain water.
Just as religions do - they all contain truths.
-Muhammed Ali

Religions are different roads converging on the same point.
What does it matter that we take different roads
so long as we reach the same goal?
-Mohandas Gandhi

Let us accept different forms of religion among men,
as we accept different languages,
wherein there is still but one human nature expressed.
Every genius has most power in his own language,
and every heart in its own religion.
-Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

What I do suggest is that the ground of religious experience
is common to all mankind
and that the energies arising from that ground
take on the garb of the psychological and spiritual peculiarities
of the culture in which they are manifested.
-Charles Ponce

As one can ascend to the top of a house
by means of a ladder or a tree or a staircase or a rope,
so diverse are the ways and means to approach God,
and every religion in the world shows one of these ways.
-Ramakrishna

The ways to God are as many
as the breaths of human beings.
-Sufi Saying

The mystics speak in a hundred different ways
but if God is one and the Way is one,
how could their meaning be other than one?
What appears in different disguises is one essence.
A variety of forms, but a unity of substance.
-Djalal ad-Din Rumi

There is only one religion
though there are a hundred versions of it.
-George Bernard Shaw

All religions, all this singing.
One song.
-Djalal ad-din Rumi

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion,
he has reached the heart of the others too.
-Mohandas Gandhi

I love you when you bow in your mosque,
kneel in your temple, pray in your church.
For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.
-Kahlil Gibran

The lovers of God
have no religion but God alone.
-Djalal ad-din Rumi

There are many religions.
Each one believes it is the only one
but in reality there is only One,
and that One has no religion.
-Mooji

Truth is like a great mirror shattered by time
into a hundred thousand pieces,
which enables all who possess a small fragment to declare,
'My Religion - Truth is the true one.'
-Gibrail Khan

It seems as if there are almost two different kinds of religion,
one of which brutally divides,
and one of which unites (or can unite).
-Ken Wilber

I like the religion that teaches
liberty, equality and fraternity.
-B. R. Ambedkar

The spirit of religion is a reconciling spirit.
-Benjamin Whichcote

God has no religion.
-Anonymous

Religion must not be either egocentric or altruistic, but theocentric.
We have to center our whole thought and mind upon God,
and then extend our arms to everyone,
embracing them all in the love of God.
-Prabhavanand

The end of all religions is the realizing of God in the soul.
That is the universal religion.
-Vivekananda

Where all religions meet is the realization, in no mystical sense,
but in the most worldly and everyday sense,
that God is everything, and everything is God.
-Ramana Maharshi

Religion consists in the simple feeling
of a a relationship of dependence upon something above us
and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power.
-Miguel de Unamuno

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world

is not the church but the world itself.

-Wallace Stevens

We are pantheists when we study nature,
polytheists when we write poetry,
monotheists in our morality.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As we become whole, we realize there is no conflict
between the transcendence and monotheism of the male sky-god religions
and the immanence of the female polytheistic nature-oriented religions.
-Judith Blackstone

Polytheism and monotheism as we have known them
involve a projection "out there"
onto Mother (Nature) or Father (Nature) or their surrogates.
-Marion Woodman

Perhaps no one religion contains all the truth of the world.
Perhaps every religion contains fragments of truth
and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments
and to piece them together.
-Christopher Paolini

As a matter of fact, you have deficiencies in all religions,
but you have truth in all religions.
-Hans Kung

Every religion is true one way or another.
It is true when understood metaphysically.
But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors interpreting them as facts,
then you are in trouble.
-Joseph Campbell

Any system of religion that has anything in it
that shocks the mind of a child,
cannot be a true system.
-Thomas Paine

The religion of one
seems madness unto another.
-Sir Thomas Browne

One man's theology
is another man's belly laugh.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Each set of religious abstractions
is related, somehow, characterologically,
to the person who made them;
or: tell me your religion and you tell me what you are.
-Gina Cerminara

A myth is a religion
in which no one any longer believes.
-James Feibleman

The religions we call false were true once.
They also were affirmations of the conscience
correcting the evil customs of their times.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yesterday's religion is tomorrow's mythology;
today's mysticism is tomorrow's religion.
-Anonymous

The religion of one age
is the literary entertainment of the next.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Religion is to mysticism
what popularization is to science.
-Henri Bergson

Religion was devised to assist the masses.
Mysticism was designed to assist the individual.
When religion has led a man to the threshold
of deeper truths behind his own, its task is done.
-Paul Brunton

Religion is regarded by the common people as true,
by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Our religion is the tradition of our ancestors -
the dreams of our old men,
given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit -
and it is written in the hearts of our people.
-Chief Seattle

God comes down to earth to found a religion,
and the Devil comes right after him and organizes it.
-Vivekananda

All religions have been made by men.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

All the religion we have
is the ethics of one or another holy person.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who look beneath the surface
see one and the same truth beneath all religions,
which have been given at different times by different masters.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

The founders of the great religions spoke from [their] inner experience.
When they sought to explain God,
they did so in terms that they hoped would touch their listeners.
-Yogananda

Each religion has a unique character
that enables it to speak to certain people and not to others.
-Paul Ferrini

At the present time I really have no religion at all...
But I really love and respect all religions and philosophies
and I see how they get formed, how they grow up,
and how powerful they are.
But for me to believe in a specific god...no.
-Don Miguel Ruiz

Every formula of every religion
has in this age of reason,
to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.
-Mohandas Gandhi

I believe all religions
are becoming obsolete.
-John Templeton

Vision is the end of religion.
-Theodore Roethke

Religions die slowly.
-Franz Marc

People of this age care for the essence of everything.
They will accept the essential of religion
and not its non-essentials
(that is, the rituals, ceremonials, dogmas and creeds.)
-Ramakrishna

In the end all religions tend to point at the same light.
In between the light and us,
sometimes there are too many rules.
-Paul Coelho

Rites, sacraments, and ceremonials
are valuable to the extent that they remind those who partake of them
of the true Nature of Things.
-Aldous Huxley

Religion is the first attempt of man to go beyond himself
and beyond the obvious and material facts of the world.
-Aurobindo Ghose

Religion is seeking after the spiritual, the suprarational.
-Aurobindo Ghose

Religion is the intellectual resolution
of the unknown.
-Buckminster Fuller

I am a deeply religion nonbeliever.
This is a somewhat new kind of religion.
-Albert Einstein

The cosmic religious experience
is the strongest force and the noblest driving force
behind scientific research.
-Albert Einstein

Science is clearly one of the most profound methods
that humans have yet devised for discovering truth,
while religion remains the greatest single force for generating meaning.
-Ken Wilber

True science and true religion are twin sisters.
-Thomas H. Huxley

Science and religion are not at odds.
Science is simply too young to understand.
-Dan Brown

Science investigates, religion interprets.
Science gives man knowledge which is power;
religion gives man wisdom which is control.
Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values.
The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality;
it is a profound source of spirituality.
-Carl Sagan

Like the meridians as they approach the poles,
science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge
as they draw nearer to the whole.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Spirituality is the poetry of our experience.
Science is the gauge of our reality.
Together, they create the essence of our humanity.
- Steve Maraboli

Every genuine scientist
must be finally a metaphysician.
-George Bernard Shaw

Mystics always hope
that science will some day overtake them.
-Booth Tarkington

Religion will not gain its old power
until it can face change in the same spirit as science does.
Its principles may be eternal,
but the expression of those principles requires continual development.
-Alfred North Whitehead

All religions are therapies
of the sorrows and disorders of the soul.
-Carl Jung

Religion is essentially the art and the theory
of the remaking of man.
-Edmund Burke

The end of all religion is not states of feeling
but the transformation of personality.
-Anton T. Boison

Religion is the endeavor of divided and incomplete personality
to attain unity and completion.
-Charles Francis Potter

We do not need a religion which reminds us of our weaknesses,
but one that awakens our strengths.
-Selvarajan Yesudian

The new religious consciousness thirsts for synthesis,
for the conquest of duality for a higher fullness;
it would contain what it formerly did not,
unite two poles, two opposite abysses.
-Nikolai Berdyaev

At the core of prophetic religion is transformation -
a change of heart, a revolution of the spirit, a conversion of the soul
that issues forth in new personal and social behavior.
-Jim Wallis

From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols,
religion will be transformed into an activity
concerned mainly with experience and intuition -
an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance
to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties,
everyday human relationships.
-Aldous Huxley

To know what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty...
this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religousness.
-Albert Einstein

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate,
of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty,
which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary form -
it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

Someday music will be the means of expressing universal religion.
Time is wanted for this;
but there will come a day when music and its philosophy
will become the religion of humanity.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

There is a religion born inside of you

when you discover your unique path of unfoldment.

It is like no other religion.

-Harriet Mohr

We know that religion means reconnection.
At the heart of religion lies an attempt to annul the separation
of individual consciousness from the all-encompassing, infinite consciousness.
In order to reverse the original separation,
we must expand our images and views
concerning God, god figures, and divine powers
to include essence that are the source energies in all manifestations.
-Chris Griscom

The true function of religion is to remind humans of their latent divinity,
to draw their attention to the indwelling presence of the divine in human nature.
-Haridas Chaudhuri

Religion's real business is to prepare man's mind, life and bodily existence
for the spiritual consciousness to take it up.
-Aurobindo Ghose

Spiritual rebirth is the key
to the aspirations all the higher religions.
-Thomas Merton

Like a bee gathering honey from different flowers,
the wise man accepts the essence of different scriptures
and sees only the good in all religions.
-The Srimad Bhagavatam

True religion is reverence of the Light in others.
True religion is a recognition of the source of Light of all Lights
and living a life of Light.
-Torkom Saryadarian

The Sufi recognizes the knowledge of self
as the essence of all religions.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Self-realization is, in fact, the only religion.
For it is the true purpose of religion,
no matter how people define their beliefs.
-Yogananda

True religion is the radiation of our Innermost Core of Light.
-Torkom Saraydarian

The consciousness of God in the soul of man
is the essence, indeed the sum and substance, of all religions.
-Ralph Waldo Trine

All religions postulate the three fundamentals,
the world, the soul and God,
but it is only the one Reality that manifests itself as these three.
-Ramana Maharshi