Famous quotes containing the word religions:
“The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)