Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

Best Quotes about Churches

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.

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

Graham, Billy

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.

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?

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

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

Havner, Vance

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

Allen, Fred A.

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

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

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Defoe, Daniel

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

23.

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

Wilder, Billy

24.

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

25.

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

Thomson, James

26.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

28.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

29.

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

30.

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

Atkinson, Brooks

31.

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

32.

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

Chadwick, Henry

33.

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

34.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

35.

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

Carey, George

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Carey, George

39.

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

Weil, Simone

40.

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.

Proverb, Irish

41.

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

Thomson, James

42.

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

Amis, Kingsley

43.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

44.

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

Wesley, John

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

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.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.

Luther, Martin

50.

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