Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dan Brown

Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.

Ambrose Bierce

ORTHODOX, n. An ox wearing the popular religious joke.

Rajneesh

Be happy! and meditation will follow. Be happy, and religion will follow. Happiness is a basic condition. People become religious only when they are unhappy - then their religion is pseudo. Try to understand why you are unhappy.

Thomas Jefferson

On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.

Thomas Jefferson

[All religious sects] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight; and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies in which they live.

Thomas Jefferson

The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!

Thomas Jefferson

Your sect [the Jews] by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal point of religious insolence, inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble and practised by all when in power. Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religions, as they do our civil rights, by putting all on equal footing. But more remains to be done.

Thomas Jefferson

This is perhaps the most important statement on religion ever made. It clarified the intent of the founders of the constitution irrespective of the attempts of modern day religious revisionists...

Thomas Jefferson

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God

Chuck Comeau

We just wanted to make albums where every song stands out and is different. It must not be the same track from one to 12.

Anne Sexton

The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.

Anne Rice

Garden of Pain, I need you. What were the songs of beasts to the cries of sentient souls?

Andrew Solomon

I don't believe that raising my voice in song is going to be pleasing to a God who is sitting upstairs somewhere, waiting to be pleased.

Clay Aiken

A song can be more than words and music ... when sung with soul a song carries you to another world, to a place where no matter how much pain you feel, you are never alone.

Clay Aiken

Clive [Davis] tried to tell me that saying certain words in a song- or as he says, ‘putting some balls into it'- isn't bad, it's just strong emotion. Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did.

Clay Aiken

I had been told by a number of people that if you get half of what you want on your first album, you're doing really well. Pretty much every single thing they had was something that I liked. There were maybe one or two songs I didn't like, and they were taken off the album quickly.

Daniel Johnston

When I was writing songs, I always thought I'd make more of a career out of the drawings, the comics even more than the music.

Daniel Johnston

When I'm doing a drawing, I get lots of ideas I use them in my songs, even. I do a lot of drawings because that's where I get most of my spending cash and I just always have to have new records, to get something to satisfy my listening pleasure.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is the nature of strong people that they can bring out crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them.

Anne Rice

Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.

Anne Rice

I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat? -Lestat

Anne Rice

Ignore any loss of nerve, ignore any loss of self-confidence, ignore any doubt or confusion. Move on believing in love, in peace, and harmony, and in great accomplishment. Remember joy isn't a stranger to you. You are winning and you are strong. Love. Love first, love always, love forever.

Anne Rice

The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable.

Anna Friel

Now learning a bit more about footballers I think what they need to do well, is someone who really wants to stay in the background and just be a strong support.

Anita Brookner

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

Andrew Solomon

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Beware of charisma . . . Representative Men; was Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1850 phrase for the great men in a democracy . . . Is there some common quality among these Representative Men who have been most successful as our leaders? I call it the need to be authentic-or, as our dictionaries tell us, conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance or belief. While the charismatic has an uncanny outside source of strength, the authentic is strong because he is what he seems to be.