Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

Best Quotes about Churches

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.

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

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 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

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

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

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

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

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

Havner, Vance

10.

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

11.

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.

Proverb, Irish

14.

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

Proverb, French

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Amis, Kingsley

18.

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

Mencken, H. L.

19.

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

20.

21.

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

Shedd, Charlie

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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

Carey, George

24.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

25.

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

Thomson, James

26.

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

27.

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

Fuller, Thomas

28.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Carey, George

32.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Thomson, James

36.

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

Defoe, Daniel

37.

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

Mott, John R.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

My own mind is my own church.

Paine, Thomas

41.

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

Allen, Fred A.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Wilder, Billy

48.

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.

49.

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

Smith, Sydney

50.

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