Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel—these undisputedly are the great molders of public opinion and public morals to-day.

For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds.

Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noble;but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge.

It is meant that noble minds keep ever with their likes; for who so firm that cannot be seduced.

As belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief.

Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in the Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the opposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.

I don't find anyone more noble than Jesus.

To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, ["] and to preach there-from that, "In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread," to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.

Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago.

You can't deny that religion has done some good. It organizes lots of anti-poverty programs and soup kitchens and missionary work. But I would say that, first of all, all those things can be accomplished without religion. You can be ethical, somebody who does the right thing without feeling that he has to in order to get his ass saved in the next life.

Pleas'd look forward, pleas'd to look behind,And count each birthday with a grateful mind.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

I do object to the sensationalism or even the voyeurism of doing things in church or out of church.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise. That last infirmity of noble mind. To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

Poverty is caused by sin and disobeying the word of god.

The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

The Bible is big in the religion, treating people as you want to be treated.

Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

Father Mapple paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.

The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.