Motivational Quotes

Churches

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

Best Quotes about Churches

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

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

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

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Be neither intimate nor distant with the clergy.

Proverb, Irish

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.

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

Defoe, Daniel

10.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

Mencken, H. L.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Selden, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Thomson, James

21.

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

Fielding, Henry

22.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

Cowper, William

23.

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

Weil, Simone

24.

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

Nash, L. L.

25.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

Fuller, Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.

Luther, Martin

30.

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

31.

Too hot to go to Church? What about Hell?

Poster In Dayton, Ohio

32.

It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.

Penn, William

33.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

34.

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

Havner, Vance

35.

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

Mott, John R.

36.

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

Carey, George

37.

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

Atkinson, Brooks

38.

The local church is the outcrop of the church universal.

Forsyth, Peter T.

39.

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

40.

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Melbourne, Lord

41.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

42.

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

43.

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

Proverb, French

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Thomson, James