Religion (n.) first arose, not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind.
Religion (n.) becomes useless to all the purposes of life once we cannot tell whether God is one or many, perfect or imperfect, dead or alive.
Religion (n.) is felt, not reasoned: each man, conscious of his weakness and misery, seeks protection from the being on whom all nature depends.
Religion (n.) staked on life's being happier than miserable is staked on a point that can never be settled — and so tacitly confesses itself equally uncertain.
Religion (n.) however corrupted is still better than no religion at all.
Religion (n.) works silently, humanizing conduct and confounded with morality; once it acts as a separate principle, it has left its sphere and become a cover for faction and ambition.
Religion (n.) as the vulgar practise it courts God with frivolous observances, ecstasies or credulity, since the people who alone might need religious motives are incapable of a religion where God is pleased by nothing but virtue.
Religion (n.) in its popular forms leaves a wise magistrate hoping at most to make a saving game of it.
Religion (n.) unites all men at one point only — that there is a first cause; add a proposition and the non-conformists appear.
Religion (n.) springs from no original instinct: unlike self-love or love of progeny, it is not universal, and no two men have ever agreed precisely in it — so it must be a secondary principle, easily perverted.
Religion (n.) begins not in speculative curiosity or love of truth but in the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge and the appetite for food.
Religion (n.) has its fictions as well as its genuine principles: as theism holds the sublime and the ravishing, by the analogy of nature religious fictions must hold the base, the absurd and the terrifying in equal measure.
Religion (n.) surveyed across nations and ages looks like sick men's dreams — or perhaps the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape.
Religion (n.) is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery; doubt is all our scrutiny yields — and even doubt survives only by setting the superstitions quarrelling while we slip away into philosophy.
Religion (n.) in the modern form inspects our very thoughts — a rule the more austere for being guarded by infinite though distant rewards, from which nothing can be concealed.