Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

Best Quotes about Churches

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

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.

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

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.

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

Nash, L. L.

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

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

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

Gaulle, Charles De

10.

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

Havner, Vance

11.

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

12.

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

Smith, Sydney

13.

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

14.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

15.

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

Atkinson, Brooks

16.

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

17.

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

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.

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

20.

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

Ruskin, John

21.

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

22.

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

Mott, John R.

23.

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

Proverb, French

24.

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

Graham, Billy

25.

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

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 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

28.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

29.

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

Thomson, James

30.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

31.

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

Wilder, Billy

32.

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

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.

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

35.

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

36.

The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.

Wotton, Sir Henry

37.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

38.

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

Fuller, Thomas

39.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

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

Voltaire

42.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

44.

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

Mencken, H. L.

45.

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

Weil, Simone

46.

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.

Proverb, Irish

47.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.