Leo Tolstoy Quotes

My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.

Though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not done my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

Sometimes I feel like those born-again folk, always working on their faith, but I'm always working on my atheism. We all have our struggles.

For most of my life I didn't believe in God. Who had time?

I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.

For millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.

My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.

Jesus watches from the wall, But his face is cold as stone, And if he loves me As she tells me Why do I feel so all alone?

I abandoned my religious teachings after I read the Bible twice - cover to cover. It took me a couple of years.

I do think that many religious people have enormous doubts.

Miserable indeed is that religious teaching which calls itself Christian, and yet contains nothing of the cross.

Poor Lucas, always trying to protect me from danger. He’d never guessed that I was the dangerous one.

Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image as they're so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don't let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.

I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they darenot trust their presentiments.

I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to go to church no more.

I was in prison and I was an atheist. I didn't believe in anything.

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.

He was sick of God and God's religion, sick of all the little religious social clubs that didn't seem to make any real difference or affect any real changes.

I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.

Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.