Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.

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.

If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious "bad man" is the worst of all.

If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one...

I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion; almost purely philosophical. I didn't want to. I'm not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.

Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.