Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

- Fuller, Thomas

Best Quotes about Churches

Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work.

O'Casey, Sean

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

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

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Fielding, Henry

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

A group touring Westminster Abbey in London heard the guide list the famous people buried within its walls. During a momentary silence a little old lady's voice blurted out loud and clear, Anybody been saved here lately?

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

Pound, Ezra

10.

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

Weil, Simone

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

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

Smith, Sydney

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Penn, William

16.

A glorious Church is like a magnificent feast; there is all the variety that may be, but every one chooses out a dish or two that he likes, and lets the rest alone: how glorious soever the Church is, every one chooses out of it his own religion, by which he governs himself, and lets the rest alone.

Selden, John

17.

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.

Spong, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Amis, Kingsley

21.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.

Moody, Dwight L.

23.

If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.

O'Casey, Sean

24.

And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

Defoe, Daniel

25.

I'm a priest, not a priestess. Priestess implies mumbo jumbo and all sorts of pagan goings-on. Those who oppose us would love to call us priestesses. They can call us all the names in the world -- it's better than being invisible.

Heyward, Carter

26.

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

Nash, L. L.

27.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

28.

My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation; and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them.

Ruskin, John

32.

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.

Wotton, Sir Henry

33.

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

34.

Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

King Jr. Martin Luther

35.

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

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

Proverb, French

37.

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

38.

It is indolence... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.

Austen, Jane

39.

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

40.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

41.

I think a bishop who doesn't give offence to anyone is probably not a good bishop.

Thomson, James

42.

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

Allen, Fred A.

43.

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

44.

A little, round, fat, oily man of God.

Thomson, James

45.

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

Carey, George

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.

Shedd, Charlie

50.

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave--with both ends kicked out.

Havner, Vance