Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

Best Quotes about Churches

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?

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

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

Chadwick, Henry

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

Defoe, Daniel

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Carey, George

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

10.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

11.

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

Fielding, Henry

12.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

13.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

14.

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

Carey, George

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

18.

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

Shedd, Charlie

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

Fuller, Thomas

23.

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

Smith, Sydney

24.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

25.

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

26.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.

Luther, Martin

27.

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

Moody, Dwight L.

28.

My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

29.

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

Weil, Simone

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Graham, Billy

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

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

Penn, William

41.

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

Wilder, Billy

42.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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.

44.

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

Havner, Vance

45.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

46.

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

47.

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

Thomson, James

48.

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

Amis, Kingsley

49.

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

50.

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

Atkinson, Brooks