Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

- Shedd, Charlie

Best Quotes about Churches

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voltaire

10.

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

11.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.

Proverb, Irish

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

Moody, Dwight L.

16.

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

Mencken, H. L.

17.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.

Luther, Martin

18.

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

19.

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

Mott, John R.

20.

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

Proverb, French

21.

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

22.

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?

23.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

25.

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

Carey, George

26.

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.

27.

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

Graham, Billy

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Havner, Vance

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

35.

How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is I will see you in the vestry after service.

Smith, Sydney

36.

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

Shedd, Charlie

37.

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

Defoe, Daniel

38.

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

39.

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

Joyce, James

40.

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

Thomson, James

41.

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

42.

43.

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.

Chadwick, Henry

44.

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

45.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

46.

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.

47.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

48.

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

Penn, William

49.

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

50.

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

Weil, Simone