Our education, our environment, our whole culture insists that we must become something. Our philosophies, our religions and sacred books all say the same thing. But now I see that the very process of becoming something implies envy, which means that I am not satisfied with being what I am; and I want to understand what I am, I want to find out why I am always comparing myself with another, trying to become something; and in understanding what I am there is no need for discipline. In the process of that understanding, integration comes into being. The contradiction in me yields to the understanding of myself, and this in turn brings an action which is integral, whole.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being—free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies—and therefore you can find out what religion is.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.
—Joseph Campbell
There are some forms of religion that are bad; just as there’s bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.
—Karen Armstrong
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
—Richard Burton
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
—Annie Dillard
A cult is a religion with no political power.
—Tom Wolfe
I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
—Henry Ward Beecher
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
—Albert Einstein
Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and religion. But it creates a great temptation.
—Thomas Merton
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
—Steven Weinberg
A cult is a religion with no political power.
—Tom Wolfe
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
—Carl Sagan
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
—Bill Gates
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
—Abraham Lincoln