I believe it is man who created God in his image and not the other away around; also I see no reason to believe in life after death.

It was Gustave Flaubert who said, “It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.”

"In regard to religious matters," he wrote, "there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of the people from their infancy; to inquire or exert their reason is denounced as sinful."

The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home."

Not only is his advanced Rationalism found in his works — these include Poems and Songs and Absalom's Hair) — but he translated Robert Ingersoll for the Norwegian audience.

Carlyle abandoned his Christian beliefs in 1818 after reading Gibbon. After further study... Carlyle gave up the Holy Ghost and immortality, as well, adopting a Pantheism like Goethe's.

Butler wrote, "Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously."

"The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all."

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.

Stephen said he never lost his faith because he never had any and helped to bring Thomas Henry Huxley's newly coined word, "agnostic," into vogue.