“Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.” 

“I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.”

“The worship of power is an old religion.”

“The bible is literature, not dogma.”

“Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.” 

“I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.” 

“We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.” 

My father was Muslim, and my mom is Christian, and we moved from New Orleans to Oakland, so I always had this appreciation for different cultures.

“I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.” 

“I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.” 

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.” 

“Theology is only thought applied to religion.”

“It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.” 

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

“One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.” 

“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.” 

“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

“The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. 

“Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.”

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.