“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Mrs. Harrison Smith (6 August 1816)
1810s
Context: It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest.

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Thomas Jefferson 456

3rd President of the United States of America 1743–1826

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Variant: Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting
Context: In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting [C'est dans la connaissance des conditions authentiques de notre vie qu'il nous faut puiser la force de vivre et des raisons d'agir].

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“The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end.”

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"Proclamation 3560 — Thanksgiving Day, 1963" (5 November 1963) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9511
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Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 85

“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.”

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