Religions cannot change you. If you are angry, you will become an angry Muslim or Hindu. If you are righteous, you will become a righteous Christian or Jew.
I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the universe out of nothing.
My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We're all god.
Most religions assume that you find purpose through some agent that sits above or outside the world and imbues it with purpose.
We need to agree on common values for all religions as soon as possible, a kind of secular Ten Commandments on which we will build the world of tomorrow.
Being raised by a Catholic father, a Protestant mother, and marrying the Muslim father of my three children, I encourage people to respect and at least try to understand different religions.
If women are not accorded equal place in the leadership of the Catholic Church and the other great world religions, they will always be treated as inferiors in earthly matters as well.
More than 300 languages are spoken in London. Religions are freely practiced. Rich and poor live on the same street, side by side. We've actually escaped many of the most difficult problems - integration and community cohesion.
The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.
Religions take donations and don't pay taxes.
Various religious systems have been given to humanity at different times, each suited to meet the spiritual needs of the people among whom it was promulgated, and, coming from the same divine source: - God, all religions exhibit similar fundamentals or first principles.
All religions have always hated females.
Donald Trump tests the limits of campaign speech. He makes false statements and refuses to correct them. He attacks other religions and ethnic groups, inflaming domestic tension and foreign terrorist rage.
All religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.
The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.
All organized religions are basically the same.
All thoughtful persons perceive that the ideas of the morality of sexual relations upheld by the religions and laws of the Western nations are in our time undergoing a radical transformation.
As a boy, I found myself drawn to Arthurian legends, and then to Celtic mythology, and then further east into the mysticism of Asian religions.
I don't think people by nature are extremists. You will never find a population of extremists. Extremists have existed throughout the centuries on all religions. And what happens is, extremists start to have more leverage when the situation is bad.
One of the things that all religions have is a narrative of doomsday. There has to be some kind of overarching fear of the future. If there wasn't, none of the religions could invoke this important thing - that science has no evidence of, by the way - called free will.
In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.
I've become more and more aware of the promise and struggle to teach the global mind nowadays because I use every chance I get to ask faculty and administrators of management education programs why we don't offer at least one course - not even required, just an elective - on the world's religions.
I have always marveled that so many religions exact such revenge against dissenters. It only weakens the appeal of their faith and contradicts any claims they might have made that 'all religions are basically the same.' If all religions were indeed the same, why not let someone be 'converted' to another religion?
Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.
In all religions, we hear of the Seven Planetary Genii: the Hindu tells of Seven Rishi, the Parsi of Seven Ameskaspentas, the Mohammedan of Seven Archangels, and our Christian religion has its Seven Spirits before the Throne.
Germany wants peaceful coexistence of Muslims and members of other religions.
The notion that Western religions are more rigid than those of Asia is overdrawn. Ours is the most permissive society history has ever known - almost the only thing that is forbidden now is to forbid - and Asian teachers and their progeny play up to this propensity by soft-pedaling Hinduism's, Buddhism's, Sufism's rules.
Theosophy has no code of morals, being itself the embodiment of the highest morality; it presents to its students the highest moral teachings of all religions, gathering the most fragrant blossoms from the gardens of the world-faiths.
The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
I believe in God and not religion, because I believe religion is the double cross. Because I've been double crossed by three religions, so I think I can safely say that religion - there is maybe something wrong with religion. Every temple that's put up may not be a holy one, so watch out.
All religions teach the same basic thing, that you have to stand up for those that are considered the worst.
I grew up in New York City, a town with different races, religions, and peoples. It breeds tolerance.
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
It's always interesting about God because it's like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.