Motivational Quotes

Churches

I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.

- Carey, George

Best Quotes about Churches

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

Carlyle, Thomas

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.

Havner, Vance

People have described me as a management bishop but I say to my critics, Jesus was a management expert too.

Carey, George

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

Shaw, George Bernard

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.

Penn, William

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.

Cheever, John

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

Joyce, James

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

10.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

11.

The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

12.

Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.

Ruskin, John

13.

Though the church has many critics, it has no rivals.

14.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

Swift, Jonathan

15.

The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.

Voltaire

16.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Murdoch, Iris

17.

It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.

Havner, Vance

18.

Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.

Gaulle, Charles De

19.

He who is near the Church is often far from God.

Proverb, French

20.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

21.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

22.

Archbishop -- A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.

Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph

24.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

25.

Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.

Norman, Edward

26.

The Christian church is a society of sinners. It is the only society in the world, membership in which is based upon the single qualification that the candidate shall be unworthy of membership.

Morrison, Charles C.

27.

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.

Atkinson, Brooks

28.

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.

Pound, Ezra

29.

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

Walker, Alice

30.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

Weil, Simone

31.

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

32.

Churchgoers are like coals in a fire. When they cling together, they keep the flame aglow; when they separate, they die out.

Graham, Billy

33.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

34.

My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

35.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Pound, Ezra

36.

A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.

Hazlitt, William

37.

Those who marry God can become domesticated too -- it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word Love means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and Ave Marialike dearest is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves -- it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.

Greene, Graham

38.

It's about time we quit playing church in these services that start at eleven o clock sharp and end at twelve o clock dull.

Havner, Vance

39.

What makes a church great in the eyes of God? Participation, proclamation, preservation, and propagation. Every church ought to exhibit all four.

Hawkins, O. S.

40.

Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.

Fuller, Thomas

41.

42.

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.

Fielding, Henry

43.

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

Allen, Fred A.

44.

The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.

John Paul II

45.

I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Smith, Sydney

46.

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.

Amis, Kingsley

47.

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.

Wotton, Sir Henry

48.

His creed no parson ever knew, for this was still his simple plan, to have with clergymen to do as little as a Christian can.

Doyle, Sir Francis

49.

The greatest hindrances to the evangelization of the world are those within the church.

Mott, John R.

50.

The church exists to train its member through the practice of the presence of God to be servants of others, to the end that Christlikeness may become common property.

Brown, William Adams