Nostradamus used a technique that prophets and astrologers use to this day: “ambiguous specificity.”

"Hood an ass with reverend purple," wrote Jonson, "so you can hide his two ambitious ears, and he shall pass for a cathedral doctor."

Emerson rejected the idea of personal immortality and repudiated even the amorphous Unitarian God, believing instead in a vaguely Pantheistic Over-Soul.

This "great Catholic poet" – you might as well call him the only great Catholic poet – rejected or ignored much of the theology of his church.

What truly religious sentiments Shakespeare does exhibit in his plays, have no depth, as if he were either indifferent to, or ignorant of, the theology of the skeptical Elizabethan Age.

If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. … Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.

He either believed all religions or none of them. He did not believe in a future life. A fairer estimate of Burton's religion might be that he was an Agnostic.

He always expressed a profound contempt for the Roman Catholic Church, which returned the affection by putting all D’Annunzio’s work on the Index of Prohibited Books.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807) It was on this date, February 27, 1807, that the first American professional poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was born in coastal Portland, Maine. Although his father steered him toward a legal career, Henry was too in love with language to turn down the newly founded chair in modern languages at Bowdoin […]

"I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance," wrote Marlowe in “The Jew of Malta.”