#eli

Lord, what fools these mortals be! ↗

— William Shakespeare

#elizabethan #robin-goodfellow #dreams

Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#god #morocco #sahara #sahara-desert #spiritual

The founder of a religion must be able to turn water into wine -- cure with a word the blind and lame, and raise with a simple touch the dead to life. It was necessary for him to demonstrate to the satisfaction of his barbarian disciple, that he was superior to nature. In times of ignorance this was easy to do. The credulity of the savage was almost boundless. To him the marvelous was the beautiful, the mysterious was the sublime. Consequently, every religion has for its foundation a miracle -- that is to say, a violation of nature -- that is to say, a falsehood. No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of a miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of, nature. ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#founding #miracle #nature #religion #sanity

You’re beautiful. If you believe it, they’ll believe it. ↗

— Victoria Scott

#believe #beauty

Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins. ↗

— Harshit Walia

#indian-fiction #inner-beauty #journey #life #philosophical

Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#belief #faith #faith

You look beautiful and tragic, just the way a heroine should on the eve of battle. Like Joan of Arc in her silver armor. ↗

— Melissa de la Cruz

#gates-of-paradise #melissa-de-la-cruz #oliver-hazard-perry #tragic #warrior

Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole." [Blog post of July 26, 2011] ↗

— Jim C. Hines

#discrimination #law #religion #business

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#business #easy #enemy #enough #friendly

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#business