The unfashionable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life," delight in abasing themselves before rags and filth, wishing to reach the opposite extreme. The graces of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation, contrition, find in associations with the coarse, the hard, the repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism, heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers.

Religion of your upbringing is like a cloak - you must know how it is made in order to take it off.

The weak spot of religion is its ridiculousness

Religion isn't always pretty. Especially viewed from the outside, by an unbeliever.

what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill.
Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect,
but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

When religion abandons poetic utterance, it cuts its own throat.

Religions get lost as people do.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

I realized that all forms of religion are masks that the divine wears to communicate with us. Behind all religions there’s a reality, and this reality wears whatever clothes it needs to speak to a particular people.

All religions fall far short of their own ideals.

Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.

In the course of history it has often happened that one or other of the imperfect religions has been taken too seriously and regarded as good and true in itself, instead of as a means to the ultimate end of all religion. The effects of such mistakes are often disastrous.