Atheism Quotes - Page 75

When I die I won't go to heaven or hell; there will just be nothingness.

No sign of purpose can be detected in any part of the vast universe disclosed by our most powerful telescopes.

Consequently, the first thing to be done in any search after philosophic principles is to travel over the special sciences with a view to extracting from them such information as is relevant to our purpose.

Thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism.

When discord dreadful bursts the brazen bars, And shatters iron locks to thunder forth her wars.

Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.

Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.

Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations.

God created the universe out of nothing in an act which also brought time into existence. Recent discoveries, such as observations supporting the Big Bang and similar astronomical phenomena, are wholly compatible with this view.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

Dr. Manton taught my youth to yawn, and prepared me to be a High-Churchman, that I might never hear him read nor read him more.

The efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith - that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind.

A belief is not true simply because it is useful.

For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified.

I do not know the needs of a god or of another world... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one.

There is no book which tells of a more infamous monster than the Old Testament, with its Jehovah of murder and cruelty and revenge, unless it be the New Testament, which arms its God with hell, and extends his outrages throughout all eternity!

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

The state authorities have no place in the church of God, no right to control and persecute the conscience.

The church lives because it witholds the results of the historical Jesus-research from you

It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.