Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary. - Oscar Wilde

  2. We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that... - C. Joybell C.

  3. I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with. - Fannie Flagg

  4. That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable. - Deb Caletti

  5. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. - David Foster Wallace

More Quotes By Reinhold Niebuhr
  1. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  2. Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.

  3. Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

  4. Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

  5. The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

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