If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
--
The Genius (1915) The University of Illinois Press, 2004, ISBN 0-252-03100-8, p. 734Theodore Dreiser
» Theodore Dreiser - all quotes »
Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side... that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
Robert M. Pirsig
The body knows no pain, not like the soul. At least a nerve has limits, a body part a name. But the soul ... the soul ... There is no bandage -- even crying is in vain.
Vanna Bonta
People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding.
Anthony Powell
Religion is not provided to us by revelation, it doesn't come from the heavens, it doesn't come from the beyond, it doesn't come from the divine. It's man-made. And it shows. It shows very well - that religion is created, invented, imposed by a species half a chromosome away from the chimpanzee.
Christopher Hitchens
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.William Ernest Henley
Dreiser, Theodore
Drell, Sidney
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