Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Churches

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 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

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

Thomson, James

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

Voltaire

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

Mott, John R.

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

Defoe, Daniel

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Fuller, Thomas

12.

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

Allen, Fred A.

13.

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

Ruskin, John

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

Wilder, Billy

17.

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

18.

Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.

Calvin, John

19.

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

20.

The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.

Brown, Robert Mcafee

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

23.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

24.

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.

25.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.

Luther, Martin

26.

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

Atkinson, Brooks

27.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

28.

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.

Wotton, Sir Henry

29.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

30.

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

31.

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

Weil, Simone

32.

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

Nash, L. L.

33.

The difference between listening to a radio sermon and going to church...is almost like the difference between calling your girl on the phone and spending an evening with her.

Moody, Dwight L.

34.

A woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.

Daly, Mary

35.

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

36.

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

Penn, William

37.

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

Havner, Vance

38.

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

Mencken, H. L.

39.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

40.

But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compass, not a weathercock.

Huxley, Aldous

41.

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

Shedd, Charlie

43.

44.

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

45.

One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.

Tozer, A. W.

46.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

50.

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

Joyce, James