Why i am not a christian and other essays on religion and related subjects Quotes

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”

“Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one’s own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.”

“A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child subject still to her power but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.”

“The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”

“We see, surrounding the narrow raft illuminated by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated on the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence.”

“When the qualities that now confer leadership have become universal, there will no longer be leaders and followers, and democracy will have been realized at last.”

“Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.”

“Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.”

“The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope.”