Agnosticism Quotes - Page 4

• We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Law, Theory Of Evolution

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Darwin on Evolution: Words of Wisdom from the Father of Evolution”, p.21, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

  Anatole France

  Inspirational, Acceptance, Risk

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• 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

  Inspirational, Morning, Atheist

  Bill Gates, Janet Lowe (1998). “Bill Gates Speaks: Insight from the World's Greatest Entrepreneur”, p.220, John Wiley & Sons

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• Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Atheist, Cat, Dark

  Robert A. Heinlein (1985). “Job, a Comedy of Justice”, Del Rey

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• That is the truth about man - that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don't understand.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Men, Misery, Dignity

  Source: www.hrc.utexas.edu

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• ... superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these intangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness. Chased from the open country, these robbers fly into the forest, and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices. ... The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom.

  David Hume

  Wise, Country, Religious

  David Hume (1779). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.10

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• And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

  David Hume

  Determination, Believe, Giving

  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding "Of Miracles" (1748)

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• I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.

  Denis Diderot

  Blow, Light, Darkness

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• So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake ... Religion is all bunk.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Atheist, If There Is A God, Fake

  "What on Earth is an Atheist!". Book by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 1972.

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• The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening.

  Pat Robertson

  Christian, Atheist, Government

  TV Series "The 700 Club", www.imdb.com. (1966- ).

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• As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.

  Protagoras

  Mean, Knowing, Religion

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• I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place. Any God worth "believing in" would surely prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Atheist, Believe, Hypocrite

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• The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

  H. L. Mencken

  Agnostic, Ecstatic, Knows

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.89, Vintage

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• Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.

  Andre Gide

  Littles, Triumph, Belief

  Andre Gide (2017). “Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality”, p.34, Routledge

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• From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hinduism religion.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Spiritual, Buddhist, Philosophy

  Swami Vivekananda (2016). “Essentials of Hinduism”, p.23, Advaita Ashrama (A publication branch of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math)

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• ..when, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles, which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory.

  David Hume

  Philosophical, Atheism, Foundation

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.358

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• The religious hypothesis, therefore, must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe: but no just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular.

  David Hume

  Religious, Atheism, Add

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.360

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• One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.

  Huston Smith

  Religious, Teaching, Loss

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• Writer Somerset Maugham, after his parents deaths, spent a few stultifying years in his uncle's vicarage. Later, in his teens at a boarding-school, having lost his belief in the existence of God said: "The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God, but on the fear of hell, tumbled down like a house of cards."

  Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon

  Uncles, School, House Of Cards

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• Science is agnostic when it comes to god; not atheistic, as some people prefer to read that laden word wrongly; just agnostic.

  Eric Chaisson

  Inspirational, Life, God

  Eric Chaisson, Lola Judith Chaisson (2007). “Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos”, p.254, Columbia University Press

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• Why do we need faith when we have the technology to move mountains?

  Karl Jakob Weber

  Moving, Technology, Mountain

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• The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Vision, Agnostic, Complexity

  "Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution". Book by Kenneth E. Boulding, 1978.

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• Anyone who feels that they're in some way plugged into a meaningful, cosmic system is given a greater psychological balance as a result-whether or not they believe it contains a god-like figure at the control panels. Lots of people have this beneficial sense of being plugged into something bigger, even if they're not religious in the going-to-church-regularly sense.

  Robin Skynner

  Meaningful, Religious, Believe

  Robin Skynner, John Cleese (1984). “Families and how to survive them”, Vintage

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• Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Empathy, Demand, Shifting

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• We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Reality, Sublime, Atheism

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