Inspirational Quotes

Kivaro

Ever since I out-ed myself as a "PWDNBIHP" (Person Who Does Not Believe in Hocus Pocus), I get great pleasure in reading material from like-minded individuals.

From Lucretius, to Hobbes, to Shelley, Russell, Sagan, and of course Hitchens (to mention just a few), I am amazed by the amount of material that is available out there to enlighten the 'masses'.

This forum particularly is a fantastic resource due to the diverse topics and knowledgeable contributors (and the levity of "The Funny Side of Religion" thread, which always starts my day with a smile).
I can only imagine that the forum is visited by many people who are seeking answers to what in the past were forbidden questions.

There is such a multitude of reflective quotes out there, that I started collecting my favorite inspirational quotes, such as:

Miracles violate the laws of Nature
- David Hume

Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred
- Shelley

And one of my favorites:
Heed not Tomorrow, heed not Yesterday; The magic words of life are Here and Now
- Omar Khayyám (May 18, 1048 – December 4, 1131)

What quote/passage/link inspired you?

sponsoredwalk

Judging by the authors you've mentioned I'd say you've recently read
Hitchen's Portable Atheist, & I can tell you that without doubt my favourite
quote from that book is in Bertrand Russell's essay when he talks about
the origins of "bless you"

The Quadratic Equation

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. —John 3:16

MagicMarker

"You sit there and you thump your bible, and you say your prayers, and it didn't get you anywhere! Talk about your psalms, talk about John 3:16 ... Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!"

parrai

This is one of my favourites, probably Hitchens at his most honest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9TMwfkDwIY

Dades

The Quadratic Equation wrote: »

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. —John 3:16

The thread title was inspirational, not implausible.

Kivaro

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

Judging by the authors you've mentioned I'd say you've recently read
Hitchen's Portable Atheist, & I can tell you that without doubt my favourite
quote from that book is in Bertrand Russell's essay when he talks about
the origins of "bless you"

You're right.
I call it my bible.

I usually spend Sunday afternoon reading it in my local coffee shop, and as I live in the Bible Belt there are usually churchgoing people there debating some fictional passage or debating the natural acts that will result in eternal damnation. I'm sure they pray for me when they see the book I'm reading.

Atheism: a non-prophet organization.

Delirium

"The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land."

-Thomas Henry Huxley

sephir0th

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton


"To live in the hearts we leave behind is to never die." - Carl Sagan

aidan24326

For me Carl Sagan's famous 'Pale Blue Dot' quote is amazing. I'm sure you all know it so I won't bother quoting, but it really is inspirationsl in the true sense of that word. We could do with more Carl Sagans in the world that's for sure. A true visionary.

(ok, for anyone who isn't familiar here's a sample quote from the great man)

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

parrai

aidan24326 wrote: »

For me Carl Sagan's famous 'Pale Blue Dot' quote is amazing. I'm sure you all know it so I won't bother quoting, but it really is inspirationsl in the true sense of that word. We could do with more Carl Sagans in the world that's for sure. A true visionary.

(ok, for anyone who isn't familiar here's a sample quote from the great man)

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

This is truth.

The Mad Hatter

Watching Cosmos for (what I admit with embarrassment is) the first time. Referring to a rather silly hypothesis by a psychiatrist about the origin of the planet Venus, which was suppressed by the scientists of the time, Sagan said:

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place for it in the endeavour of science.

Penn

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around. - Penn Jillette

dead one

Dades wrote: »

The thread title was inspirational, not implausible.

"It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves" :eek:

New_Flash

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.....

A bit long I know but always makes me smile

Kivaro

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

-Mark Twain

fatmammycat

"Some foolish men declare that Creator made the world.
The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.

If God created the world, where was he before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now?

No single being had the skill to make the world—for how can an immaterial god create that which is material?

How could God have made the world without any raw material?
If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are face with an endless regression.

If you declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have risen equally naturally.

If God created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else—and who will believe this silly stuff?
If he is ever perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him?
If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could.

If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything.

If you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do so then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble….

If he created out of love for living things and need of them he made the world; why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune?…

Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all.

And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created.
If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place?…

Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine.

Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end, and is based on the principles [natural law], life, and the rest. "

Acharya Jinasena, Mahapurana 4.16-31 (9th c. CE)

fatmammycat

Although, on reflection, less a quote, than a ramble.

Roger Hassenforder

Accustom yourself to thinking that death is no concern to us. All things good and bad are experienced through sensation, but sensation ceases at death. So death is nothing to us, and to know the truth of this makes a mortal life happy -- not by adding infinite time, but by removing the desire for immortality. There is no reason why one who is convinced that there is nothing to fear at death should fear anything about it during life. And whoever says that he dreads death not because it’s painful to experience, but only because it’s painful to contemplate, is foolish. It is pointless to agonize over something that brings no trouble when it arrives. So death, the most dreaded of evils, is nothing to us, because when we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist. It neither concerns the living nor the dead, since death does not exist for the living, and the dead no longer exist

&

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is impotent.

Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?
Whence then is evil?

The Mad Hatter

Roger Hassenforder wrote: »

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is impotent.

Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?
Whence then is evil?

You left out

"Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"

Roger Hassenforder

(deliberatley left out, some might say its contentious he deffo said it)

Delirium

"To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride."

-H.L. Mencken

Paley

I've always liked the libertarian socialist Mikhail Bakunin's take on religion as well as his politics. Here are a few of his choice quotes on the former:

Bakunin on theists with a social conscience who appeal to a benevolent God:

they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence.

For, if God exists, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him.

Flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty.

A master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.

As a jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

People's response to a life of poverty and despair:

there are only three methods of escaping such a life — two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the pub and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.

Bakunin on venerating religion because of its ancient pedigree:

Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human society.

On the man-made nature of religion and its reflection of humanity's intellectual evolution:

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed — that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind.

strobe

(From 'The Great Dictator'.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEkvS0lLG8w

This is a long one, hence the video, but certainly inspirational. I also kinda like the way it both quotes the bible and also contains the line, 'Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.' Something for everyone in the audience that way.

Sonics2k

Ah damn you Strobe I was just about to post that!

It's a fantastic speech, taught me a lot when I was a child and certainly opened my eyes to a lot more of the world.

marty1985

fatmammycat wrote: »

"Some foolish men declare that Creator made the world.
The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.

If God created the world, where was he before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now?

No single being had the skill to make the world—for how can an immaterial god create that which is material?

How could God have made the world without any raw material?
If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are face with an endless regression.

If you declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have risen equally naturally.

If God created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else—and who will believe this silly stuff?
If he is ever perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him?
If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could.

If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything.

If you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do so then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble….

If he created out of love for living things and need of them he made the world; why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune?…

Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all.

And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created.
If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place?…

Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine.

Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end, and is based on the principles [natural law], life, and the rest. "

Acharya Jinasena, Mahapurana 4.16-31 (9th c. CE)

I agree with him on some things but I can't give him 10/10 for obvious reasons.

Kivaro

One of themes I am trying to gleam from the Portable Atheist is the eventual evolution to a higher order of thinking when it comes to religion. Darwin believed that humans would eventually become more perfect as they evolved.

Along that theme:

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
-- Bertrand Russell

Paley

Kivaro wrote: »

One of themes I am trying to gleam from the Portable Atheist is the eventual evolution to a higher order of thinking when it comes to religion. Darwin believed that humans would eventually become more perfect as they evolved.

Along that theme:

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
-- Bertrand Russell

The optimist in me is hopeful that this will occur, but a lot depends on the social context in which human thinking takes place. Progress isn't necessarily one way, although one can see why it could look so to the Victorians. Europe's descent into barbarism in the 1930s and 1940s is a salutary lesson on that.

The more society advances towards a high standard of living, including providing state social welfare (thus leaving religion bereft of its traditional "in" with the marginalised via their domination of charities and the concomitant kudos that go with that), the more it needs advanced technical education which is necessarily based on materialism. Both the intellectual and the social foundations of religion's appeal need to be undermined.

There will probably always be a large section of the population with a tendency towards mumbo-jumbo thinking. But if that style of thinking falls upon unreceptive ground then it'll be seen as an oddity rather than being a serious social force.

Which reminds me of Marx's quote on why religion has such deep roots amongst the population:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Kivaro

Paley wrote: »

Which reminds me of Marx's quote on why religion has such deep roots amongst the population:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

That may be the most famous Atheist quote about religion of all time.

bnt

Just been listening to Victoria Coren's Heresy programme on Radio 4. The first question was about Pantomime theatre going out of fashion, and she introduced it like this:

Now, I do love a seasonal Christmas performance. I love the flamboyant costumes, and the cartoon moral stereotypes. I love being able to hiss and boo loudly, at the obvious villain who means the children no good. And, after Church ...

I think I'll change my signature until it's all over.

Lucy8080

in the interests of balance ill counter point to bakunin.

"the disciple is not above his master:but everyone when perfected shall be as his master." luke vi.40.

got that from a tolstoy book.

maybe bakunin is arguing against his own understanding. fair enough ...hope he realised it.

The Mad Hatter

Perfected people. Now, where have I heard that idea before?

Kivaro

Albert Einstein became irreligious at the age of 12:

"Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deprived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise, but is has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it."

"My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment." (my bold).

robindch

Undergod

For Jor-El so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son.

Kivaro

I'm currently at the Bertrand Russell section of "The Portable Atheist" so here's a couple of quotes from the famous antagonistic atheist:

"The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.... We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages."

"My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others."

Sarky

One of my favourites comes from XKCD.

[-0-]

Christopher Hitchens wrote:

Thomas Paine, who is I think, the greatest Englishman and the greatest American and the greatest man to use the expression The United States of America, and is the moral author of the declaration of independence. As well as having written The Age of Reason and Rights of Man, said that hereditary governance is as good as a hereditary poet. It is as absurd as that, so people who want to be governed by it are servile. My quarrel with monarchism is it's absurdity, and stupidity. The idea that it's designed by the blood, breeding a ruling family and selecting it is as nasty as breeding a master race. Eugenics won't do for politics. You can't do it. It's like reading about a ghastly animal experiment. The quarrel is with public opinion, people are servile and they want to be ruled in this way. No! What is more horrible, to see an impostor fly by on a golden coach, and to see people flinging themselves along the pavement to get a glimpse of them, and tell all their children about it? It's like North Korea. The real thing is to cure British servility.

Fantastic.

Brian Shanahan

Seeing as [-o-] has performed advanced neck romance on this thread I'll share two, both from the same author:

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease

JM Keynes was a very perceptive man.