Motivational Quotes

Churches

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

- Cowper, William

Best Quotes about Churches

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

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

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Moody, Dwight L.

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

Amis, Kingsley

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

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

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

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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

Thomson, James

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Fuller, Thomas

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.

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.

17.

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

Chadwick, Henry

18.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

19.

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

Carey, George

20.

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

21.

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

Allen, Fred A.

22.

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.

Proverb, Irish

23.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

24.

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

25.

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

Mott, John R.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Voltaire

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

32.

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

Pound, Ezra

33.

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

Havner, Vance

34.

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

Graham, Billy

35.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

36.

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

Atkinson, Brooks

37.

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.

Wotton, Sir Henry

38.

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

Nash, L. L.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Weil, Simone

42.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Defoe, Daniel

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Wilder, Billy