Quotes
Quotes about Religion
Why do blacks identify with the Christian religion of their oppressors? Source: Diane Rehm Show guest.
Adversity reminds men of religion. [Lat., Adverse res admonent religionum.]
Knowledge, without common sense, says Lee, is folly; without method, it is waste; without kindness, it is fanaticism; without religion, it is death. But with common sense, it is wisdom with method, it is power; with clarity, it is beneficence; with religion, it is virtue, and life, and peace.
Nothing can occur beyond the strength of faith to sustain, or, transcending the resources of religion, to relieve.
To a woman, the consciousness of being will dressed gives a sense of tranquility which religion fails to bestow.
Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief she is beautiful. â¢Sophia Loren Nothing's beautiful from every point of view. â¢Horace Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away. â¢George Brossin Méré ...It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have. â¢James Matthew Barrie In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty. â¢Christopher Morley Beauty is power; a smile is its sword. â¢Charles Reade Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense. â¢Kin Hubbard Beauty is not caused. It is. â¢Emily Dickinson Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused. â¢Edward Gibbon My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossomsâwill it return to my body when they scatter? â¢Kotomichi Beauty's tears are lovelier than her smile. â¢Campbell Champagne is the only wine a woman can drink and still remain beautiful. â¢Mme. de Pompadour Conceit is to nature what paint is to beauty; it is not only needless, but impairs what it would improve. â¢Pope Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth. â¢Lazarus Long Honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar. â¢Shakespeare It is good that the young are beautiful; it is the only advantage they have. â¢The Duchess of Windsor Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in good health is short lived, and apt to have ague fits. â¢Erasmus The beautiful are never desolate, But someone always loves them. â¢Bailey Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband. â¢Ambrose Bierce Everything beautiful has its moment and then passes away. â¢Luis Cernuda Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. â¢Ralph Waldo Emerson Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do. But beautiful women don't need to know about men. It's the men who have to know about beautiful women. â¢Katherine Hepburn A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever. â¢Helen Rowland There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness. â¢Countess of Blessington Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart. â¢Johann von Schiller When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of her beauty. â¢Gregory I The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman, any woman, with beautiful legs. â¢Marlene Dietrich Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. â¢John Keats I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas? â¢Jean Kerr The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt. â¢Anonymous What ever beauty may be, it has for its basis order, and for its essence unity. â¢Father Andre Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference. â¢Aristotle I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation. â¢Tyra Banks Exuberance is beauty. â¢William Blake Even with all my wrinkles! I am beautiful! â¢Bessie Delanay As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. â¢Ralph Waldo Emerson Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. â¢Kahlil Gibran Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder. â¢Immermann Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. â¢Socrates Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.
Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.
Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.
Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of his religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character.
As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
It is religion to be thus forsworn, For charity itself fulfills the law And who can never love from charity?
Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South Africa, 1906 Most Christians live in confusion in regard to their scales of values and priorities. Many honest Christian people experience the shock of a revelation when they are brought to realize that their membership of the Church constitutes a loyalty prior to their loyalty to the nation to which they belong. Patriotism is one of the powerful underground pseudo-religions of to-day, not merely nationalism. The fundamental notion that the Christians are a "peculiar people" that never is identical, or even can be, with a people in the biological, national sense of the word, is largely asleep. It can only become awake by a new grasp of the biblical truth that the Church is the "people of God", an elect race composed of people out of all nations, transcending all nations and races.
As for what the Church thinks and says, what influence does that have on the handling of American politics, the conduct of American education, the regulation of marriage and divorce, on sex and drink, on how industrial disputes are settled, on how we carry on business? As a plain matter of fact, religion in this country is generally regarded as a tolerated pastime for such people as happen to like to indulge in occasional godly exercisesâas a strictly private matter in an increasingly close-knit and socially acting societyâin other words, as something that does not count. I should like to see the Church recognize that it has been pushed into the realm of the non-essentials, and to persuade it to fight like fury for the right and the duty to bring every act of America and Americans before the bar of God's judgment. [Christian leaders] are making valiant claim to such a right and duty; but the great mass of Church members are content to regard the Church as a conglomerate of private culture clubs, nice for christenings, weddings and funerals. Most Church members readily agree with the unchurched majority that it is not the proper business of the Church to criticize America or Americans.
Commemoration of Giles of Provence, Hermit, c.710 The purpose of religionâat any rate, the Christian religionâis not to get you into heaven, but to get heaven into you.
Commemoration of Ethelburga, Abbess of Barking, 675 What happens to someone who follows heretical teachings? It became quickly and readily apparent how cruel heretical teachings are and how prevalent the heresies are in contemporary times. Victims of these teachings have been encouraged to either to escape the world and their basic humanity into some form of flight and death or to use religion to undergird and isolate further their own self-centered self from the need to be loved and to love... The conviction that heresy is cruel has given me a growing awe of and respect for orthodoxy.
More than any other religion or, indeed, than any other element in human experience, Christianity has made for the intellectual advance of man in reducing languages to writing, creating literatures, promoting education from primary grades through institutions of university level, and stimulating the human mind and spirit to fresh explorations into the unknown. It has been the largest single factor in combating, on a world-wide scale, such ancient foes of man as war, famine, and the exploitation of one race by another. More than any other religion, it has made for the dignity of human personality. This it has done by a power inherent within it of lifting lives from selfishness, spiritual mediocrity, and moral defeat and disintegration, to unselfish achievement and contagious moral and spiritual power and by the high value which it set upon every human soul through the possibilities which it held out of endless growth in fellowship with the eternal God.
As a sinful man looking at death and beyond it, into the eternal world, I need salvation. Nothing else will meet my case. There is something genuinely at stake in every man's life, the climax whereof is death. Dying is inevitable, but arriving at the destination God offers to me is not inevitable. It is not impossible to go out of the way and fail to arrive. Christian doctrine has always urged that life eternal is something which may conceivably be missed. It is possible to neglect this great salvation and to lose it eternally, even though no man may say that anything is impossible with God or that his grace may ultimately be defeated. I know it is no longer fashionable to talk about Hell, one good reason for this being that to make religion into a prudential insurance policy is to degrade it. The Faith is not a fire-escape. (Continued tomorrow).
Feast of Josephine Butler, Social Reformer, 1906 Commemoration of Apolo Kivebulaya, Priest, Evangelist, 1933 [In nineteenth-century America] religion became a matter of conduct, of good deeds, of works, with only a vague background of faith. It became highly functional, highly pragmatic; it became a guarantee of success, moral and material. "The proper study of mankind is man," was the evasion by which many American divines escaped the necessity for thought about God.
Commemoration of Sundar Singh of India, Sadhu, Evangelist, Teacher, 1929 The breadth and depth of [William] Carey's missionary service [in India] is well illustrated in the principles laid down for themselves by the Serampore Brotherhood to be read three times a year in each station in their charge. Here is a summary: To set an infinite value on men's souls. To abstain from whatever deepens India's prejudice against the Gospel. To watch for every chance of doing the people good. To preach Christ crucified as the grand means of conversions. To esteem and treat Indians always as equals. To be instant in the nurture of personal religion. To cultivate the spiritual gifts of the Indian brethren, ever pressing upon them their missionary obligation, since only Indians can win India for Christ.
Feast of Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, Teacher, Martyr, c.200 It was my generation, and the generation that preceded me, that forgot. The younger generation is not primarily to be blamed. Those who are struggling today, those who are far away and doing that which is completely contrary to the Christian conscience, are not first to be blamed. It is my generation, and the generation that preceded me, who turned away. Today we are left, not only with a religion and a church without meaning, but... with a culture without meaning.
One good man, one man who does not put on his religion once a week with his Sunday coat, but wears it for his working dress, and lets the thought of God grow into him, and through and through him, till everything he says and does becomes religious, that man is worth a thousand sermonsâhe is a living Gospelâhe comes in the spirit and power of Eliasâhe is the image of God. And men see his good works, and admire them in spite of themselves, and see that they are God-like, and that God's grace is no dream, but that the Holy Spirit is still among men, and that all nobleness and manliness is His gift, His stamp, His picture: and so they get a glimpse of God again in His saints and heroes, and glorify their Father who is in heaven.
As the wife of a state Supreme Court justice in Arkansas put it, "My husband has been a Methodist all his life, but if it comes to choosing between being a Methodist and an American, he'll be an American every time." But this was not the issue, quite. In this case the choice was between being a good Methodist and a good American, and being a tribal religionist. But the theological problem of churches without discipline comes into stark outline in the quotation. Inadequately trained for membership, admitted without preparatory training, without the proper instruments of voluntary discipline, many members have never had the discontinuity between life in Christ and life in the world brought home to them. Here the ordinary members are less at fault than the leadership of the churches, whoâthough sworn to uphold the form of sound words and doctrineâneglect catechetical instruction and concentrate solely on the acquisition of more new members at any price.
Expressions of sharp and even violent criticism of religion and the church have been welcomed, for they usually imply sincerity of thought. If caustic criticism of religious institutions and practices is irreligious, then Amos, Isaiah, and Jesus were very irreligious men. In fact, that is exactly what many of their contemporaries took them to be.
Commemoration of Lanfranc, Prior of Le Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1089 The denominations, churches, sects, are sociological groups whose principle of differentiation is to be sought in their conformity to the order of social classes and castes. It would not be true to affirm that the denominations are not religious groups with religious purposes; but it is true that they represent the accommodation of religion to the caste system. They are emblems, therefore, of the victory of the world over the church, of the secularization of Christianity, of the church's sanction of that divisiveness which the church's gospel condemns.
Feast of Paulinus, Bishop of York, Missionary, 644 God is especially present in the hearts of His people, by His Holy Spirit; and indeed the hearts of holy men are temples in the truth of things, and in type and shadow they are heaven itself. For God reigns in the hearts of His servants; there is His Kingdom. The power of grace hath subdued all His enemies; there is His power. They serve Him night and day, and give Him thanks and praise; that is His glory. This is the religion and worship of God in the temple. [Continued tomorrow] ...Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living October 11, 1997 Commemoration of Ethelburga, Abbess of Barking, 675 The temple itself is the heart of man, Christ is the high priest, who from thence sends up the incense of prayers, and joins them to His own intercession and presents all together to His Father; and the Holy Ghost by His dwelling there hath also consecrated it into a temple; and God dwells in our hearts by faith, and Christ by His Spirit, and the spirit by His purities: so that we are also cabinets of the mysterious Trinity, and what is this short of heaven itself, but as infancy is short of manhood?... The same state of life it is, but not the same age. It is heaven in a looking glass, dark but yet true, representing the beauties of the soul, and the grace of God, and the images of His eternal glory, by the reality of a special presence. ...Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living October 12, 1997 Commemoration of Wilfrid, Abbot of Ripon, Bishop of York, Missionary, 709 Commemoration of Elizabeth Fry, Prison Reformer, 1845 If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry: for I am verily persuaded, the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word.
