Secular Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old secular quotes, secular sayings, and secular proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

In our rampantly secular world, biography is now the only form of life after death. David Cannadine
The public school has become the established church of secular society. Ivan Illich
Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life. Henry Van Dyke
To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction. Joseph Addison
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. Sam Harris
Secularism is not only indifferent to alternative religious systems, but as a religious ideology it is opposed to any other religious systems. It is therefore a closed system. Harvey Cox
Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety. Stephen Young
In our hyper-secular world, worship is still inevitable. But it is vital to remember that our gods don't choose us, we choose them. John Green
Positive secularism is not tolerance of all religions, but it is the total denial of religious beliefs: it is the emergence of homogeneous human outlook which is based upon verifiable facts of life. Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
The road to the sacred leads through the secular. Abraham Joshua Heschel
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. Madeleine L'Engle
Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass. E. O. Wilson
In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith. John Taylor Gatto
The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted. William Ralph Inge
The secular world looks to the church and to its chagrin, finds no love, no life, no laughter, no hope and no happiness. Rod Parsley
Secularism denounces supernaturalism and promotes a nonreligious or antireligious basis of social organization and morality. Carl F. H. Henry
The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge. Lionel Blue
Within the field of a secular society, which is a sort of neutral frame that allows individuals to develop their own lives, so long as they don't annoy their neighbors too much, each of us has an individual myth that's driving us, which we may or may not know. Joseph Campbell
People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for. Os Guinness
Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world. Angela Carter
The line between sacred and secular is man-made. Sarah Bessey
The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion. Ulrich Beck
The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith. Christopher Henry Dawson
Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach. John Gray
Secularism breeds narcissism. There is nothing higher to live for, so you live for you. Dennis Prager
Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it. Tom Flynn
The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals. Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
Secular humanism debases the human. Sinclair B. Ferguson
The car has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond. Edward McDonagh