Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

- Beecher, Henry Ward

Best Quotes about Churches

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

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Wilder, Billy

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

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

Shedd, Charlie

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

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

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

Defoe, Daniel

13.

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

Joyce, James

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

17.

My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

18.

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

Havner, Vance

19.

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

20.

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

Graham, Billy

21.

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.

22.

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.

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

Thomson, James

25.

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

26.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

27.

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

Ruskin, John

28.

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

29.

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

Penn, William

30.

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

31.

32.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

33.

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?

34.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

38.

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

Fuller, Thomas

39.

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.

40.

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

Allen, Fred A.

41.

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

Carey, George

42.

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

Mott, John R.

43.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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