A Quote by Charles Eliot Norton

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

Charles Eliot Norton

Quote Topics

Among Childishness Civilized Faith Loss Maturity Most Portion Race Religious Religious Faith Step Toward

Quote Author

Charles Eliot Norton
American - Author
November 16, 1827 - October 21, 1908

... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.

Hannah Arendt

Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

Henry Fuseli

Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.

Jon Krakauer

The discovery of agriculture was the first big step toward a civilized life.

Arthur Keith

Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.

Alexis de Tocqueville

In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.

Edward Gibbon

The journey toward authenticity, toward becoming whole is made palpable in Maureen Seaton's Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir. It shines its considerable light on the passage from religion toward faith, from self-medication to sobriety, from daughterhood to motherhood, from being the disembodied 'good girl' to embracing her own bad lesbian self. In crisp chapters, Seaton leads us, step-by-step, over this harrowing and blissful road, so distinct from yet so much like our own.

Terry Wolverton

Among the qualities most needed among those who aspire to true leadership in the fostering of peace and goodwill among the nations and in overcoming racial and religious antagonism is the cooperative spirit and objective.

John Mott

The term religious cleansing is an accurate and effective way of expressing the current hostility and bigotry toward all civic expressions of religion... these religious cleansers use political and legal means of containment. They are America's new anti-faith bigots.

Jay Sekulow

The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers

Richard Dawkins

The trend of all knowledge at the present is to specialize, but archaeology has in it all the qualities that call for the wide view of the human race, of its growth from the savage to the civilized, which is seen in all stages of social and religious development.

Margaret Murray

Bigotry toward any faith community cannot have any place in civilized society anywhere in the world.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another; and whether the form in which slavery exists in the South is not but one modification of this universal condition... Let those who are interested remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

John C. Calhoun

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Richard Dawkins

More cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution. . .than to anything else.