101+ Quotes on Faith, Reason, Unbelief, and Atheism

1. If there were no God, there would be no atheists. G.K. Chesterton (wrap your brain around that one!)

 

2. The atheist can’t find God for the same reason that a thief can’t find a police officer. — Author Unknown

 

3. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat. — C.S. Lewis

 

4. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. — G.K. Chesterton

 

5. Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man. — Francis Bacon

 

6. A little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. — Francis Bacon

 

7. If there is a God of the universe, why should we believe that He is satisfied with us sticking our heads in the sand and not investigating claims that others make about our final destination for all eternity.

 

8. If God does not exist, everything is permissible. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

9. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. C.S. Lewis

 

10. If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible that main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

11. By night, an atheist half believes in God. — Edward Young

 

12. The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels grateful and has no one to thank. — Samuel Cavert

 

13. What do you conceive God to be like?  Some would say to believe at all in a personal God requires a giant leap of faith – but I am convinced that belief in God is a far more reasonable position than atheism.  Nature, the personal experience of literally billions of people, and something innate in the heart of man all testify to the existence of God. — George Sweeting

 

14. In all unbelief there are these two things; a good opinion of one’s self, and a bad opinion of God. — Horatius Bonar

 

15. With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another. — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799)

 

16. God is not hostile to sinners, but only to unbelievers. — Martin Luther

 

17. Christ never failed to distinguish between doubt and unbelief.  Doubt is can’t believe.  Unbelief is won’t believe.  Doubt is honesty.  Unbelief is obstinacy.  Doubt is looking for light.  Unbelief is content with darkness. — Henry Drummond

 

18. Doubt is natural within faith.  It comes because of our human weakness and frailty…Unbelief is the decision to live your life as if there is no God.  It is a deliberate decision to reject Jesus Christ and all that he stands for.  But doubt is something quite different.  Doubt arises within the context the faith.  It is a wistful longing to be sure of the things in which we trust.  But it is not and need not be a problem. — Alister McGrath

 

19. Christianity founds hospitals and atheists are cured in them, never knowing that they owe their cure to Christ. — William Temple

 

20. Atheism is a theoretical formulation of the discouraged life. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

 

21. There is nothing more profane than the image of an atheist with tears in his eyes conducting the glory and passion of Handel’s Messiah. — Franky Schaeffer

 

22. The world embarrasses me, and I cannot think that this watch exists and has no Watchmaker. — Voltaire

 

23. Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. — Voltaire

 

24. The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. — Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983)

 

25. Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking. — Kahlil Gibran

 

26. Faith is reason grown courageous. — Sherwood Eddy

 

27. A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way…  [T]he kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation…is wholly different.  Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world….  That is the “miracle” which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands. — Albert Einstein

 

28. We don’t know… how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a locus of conscious experience.  This last is, surely, among the ultimate metaphysical mysteries; don’t bet on anyone ever solving it. Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind

 

29. No explanation given wholly on physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience. — David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind

 

30. Since science is fashionable today, it allows its fraternity to propose cloddish monstrosities as a solution to man’s problems in many fields. Fashion rules and, anyway, who but the experts can even dare to speak up? Franky Schaeffer

 

31. Sin has gotten men into more trouble than science can get him out of. — Vance Havner

 

32. The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century. — G.K. Chesterton

 

33. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself. — C.S. Lewis

 

34. Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

 

35. The human genome will not help us to understand the spiritual side of humankind, or to know who God is or what love is. The well-heeled couple who decide they want to use genetics to have a child that is a gifted musician may end up with a sullen adolescent who smokes marijuana and doesn’t talk to them. — Dr. Francis Collins

 

36. When you cannot answer a skeptic, be content to wait for more light; but never forsake a great principle. — J.C. Ryle

 

37. Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. — G.K. Chesterton

 

38. Ignorance is the mark of the heathen, knowledge of the true church, and conceit of the heretics. — Clement of Alexandria

 

39. Sadly enough, there is a kind of an anti-intellectualism among many Christians: spirituality is falsely pitted against intellectual comprehension as though they stood in a dichotomy. Such anti-intellectualism cuts away at the very heart of the Christian message. Of course, there is a false intellectualism which does destroy the work of the Holy Spirit. But it does not arise when men wrestle honestly with honest questions and then see that the Bible has the answers. This does not oppose true spirituality. — Francis Schaeffer

 

40. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all. — C.S. Lewis

 

41. The secular humanist, although he would never dream of committing the social faux pas of calling a black man a negro, feels perfectly free to castigate Christians and their leaders in any way he likes. — Franky Schaeffer

 

42. Humanism is not wrong in its cry for sociological healing, but humanism is not producing it. — Francis Schaeffer

 

43. I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution. — Francis Schaeffer

 

44. A little love has made me willingly study, preach, write, and even suffer… — Richard Baxter

 

45. There is a philosophy which is a noble exercise of our reasonable faculties, and highly serviceable to religion, such a study of the works of God as leads us to the knowledge of God and confirms our faith in him. But there is a philosophy which is vain and deceitful, which is prejudicial to religion, and sets up the wisdom of man in competition with the wisdom of God, and while it pleases men’s fancies ruins their faith; as nice and curious speculations about things above us, or of no use and concern to us; or a care of words and terms of art, which have only an empty and often a cheating appearance of knowledge. — Matthew Henry

 

46. Progress is a farce because man’s head and hand have created wonders that stun the imagination, but his heart does not keep step and his morals undo all that his mind has wrought. — Vance Havner

 

47. The proud man hath no God; the envious man hath no neighbor; the angry man hath not himself. What good then, in being a man, if one has neither himself nor a neighbor nor God. — Joseph Hall

 

48. The difference between Christian thinking and the non-Christian philosopher has always been at this point. The non-Christian philosopher has always said that man is normal now, but biblical Christianity says he is abnormal now. — Francis Schaeffer

 

49. An undevout astronomer is mad. — Edward Young

 

50. I am perfectly convinced that whatever the gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear they are not that sort of thing….Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has based any doctrine on it. And the act of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is purely a modern art.  — C.S. Lewis

 

51. If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals. — Francis Schaeffer

 

52. Faith doesn’t wait until it understands; in that case it wouldn’t be faith. — Enrich Fromm

 

53. Many who plan to seek God at the eleventh hour die at 10:30. — Author Unknown

 

54. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. — G.K. Chesterton

 

55. I am sure that never was a people, who had more reason to acknowledge a Divine interposition in their affairs, than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe that they have forgotten that agency, which was so often manifested during our Revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God who is alone able to protect them. — George Washington

 

56. Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment and its wars. — Leo Tolstoy

 

57. God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand.  If you understand you have failed. — Augustine

 

58. A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride. — C.S. Lewis

 

59. If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today. — Ghandi

 

60. The trouble with some of us is that we have been inoculated with small doses of Christianity which keep us from catching the real thing. — Leslie Weatherhead

 

61. They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them. — Augustine

 

62. Die:   To stop sinning suddenly. — Ambrose Bierce

 

63. No man ever repented of being a Christian on his death bed. — Hannah More

 

64. The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, lies here, food for worms; but the work shall not be lost, for it will appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author. — Benjamin Franklin

 

65. The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded. — C.S. Lewis

 

66. Eternity to the godly is a day that has no sunset; eternity to the wicked is a night that has no sunrise. — Thomas Watson

 

67. God destines us for an end beyond the grasp of reason. — Thomas Aquinas

 

68. Everything science has taught me—and continues to teach me—strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace. — Wernher Von Braun

 

69. Every path that leads to heaven is trodden by willing feet. No one is ever driven to paradise. — Howard Crosby

 

70. Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading. — Oswald Chambers

 

71. Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. — C.S. Lewis

 

72. I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God: first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done. — Hudson Taylor

 

73. Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God. — William Carey

 

74. Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it. — Blaise Pascal

 

75. Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his faith.’  Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith.  Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. — Martin Luther

 

76. Faith cannot be inherited or gained by being baptized into a Church.  Faith is a matter between the individual and God. — Martin Luther

 

77. To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.  To one without faith, no explanation is possible. — Thomas Aquinas

 

78. A man may be theologically knowing and spiritually ignorant. — Steven Charnock

 

79. The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe with our conscious selves arose through chance seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God. — Charles Darwin

 

80. Science has itself become a kind of religion. — Carl Sagan

 

81. The kind of changes that Darwinism suggests, Local small changes are not capable of coordinating large complex solutions….it doesn’t work when you do this to  sophisticated computer programs, so why should it work in the case of biological machines? — Angus Menuge

 

82. Darwinism seems to have become a politically protected sacred cow, and I’ve never seen a sacred cow I haven’t wanted to roast – the fact that you are not supposed to criticize it is just too irresistible to me. — Angus Menuge

 

83. Nothing created everything: the scientific impossibility of atheistic evolution — Ray Comfort

 

84. Living creatures are islands of viability separated form other islands by gigantic oceans of grotesque deformity. — Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor’s Tale)

 

85. Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see. — William Newton Clark

 

86. It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom. — French proverb

 

87. Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. — Kahlil Gibran

 

88. Faith is an assent of the mind and a consent of the heart, consisting mainly of belief and trust. — E.T. Hiscox

 

89. Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into. — Mahatma Gandhi

 

90. Faith is the only known cure for fear. — Lena K. Sadler

 

91. The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weather is that which is woven of conviction. — James Russell Lowell

 

92. Faith is not a storm cellar to which men and women can flee for refuge from the storms of life. It is, instead, an inner force that gives them the strength to face those storms and their consequences with serenity of spirit. — Sam J. Ervin, Jr.

 

93. Faith is the force of life. Leo Tolstoy

 

94. Faith is building on what you know is here, so you can reach what you know is there. — Cullen Hightower

 

95. Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation. — D Elton Trueblood

 

96. Every human being is born without faith. Faith comes only through the process of making decisions to change before we can be sure it’s the right move. — Dr. Robert H. Schuller

 

97. Faith is like radar that sees through the fog – the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see. — Corrie Ten Boom

 

98. Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith. — Paul Tillich

 

99. Faith is a sounder guide than reason. Reason can only go so far, but faith has no limits. — Blaise Pascal

 

100. Before faith comes, reason is king.  After faith comes, reason is servant. — Danielg

 

101. The fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God.’  King David, Psalm 14:1

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