Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

Best Quotes about Churches

My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Thomson, James

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

Cheever, John

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

Joyce, James

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 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.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

11.

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

Shedd, Charlie

12.

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

Allen, Fred A.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.

Luther, Martin

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

20.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.

Wotton, Sir Henry

24.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

25.

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

26.

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

Defoe, Daniel

27.

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

28.

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

Carey, George

29.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

30.

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

Fielding, Henry

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.

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

Thomson, James

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Havner, Vance

37.

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

38.

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

Nash, L. L.

39.

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

40.

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

Chadwick, Henry

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

43.

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Weil, Simone

48.

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

49.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

50.

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