Inspirational Quotes on Religion

“If our effort to know God more clearly is not an effort to love him more dearly, it will be fatal.”

“We were made to be mirrors perfectly reflecting God's goodness, but with sin that mirror fractured and the reflection is distorted.”

“We forgot that there are some things that we cannot get hold of with our minds. The mind is good -- God put it there. He gave us our heads, and it was not His intention that our heads would function just as a place to hang a hat. He gave us our heads, and He put brains in our heads, and that faculty we call the intellect has its own work to do. But that work is not the apprehending of divine things -- that is of the Holy Spirit. Let me remind you now that modern orthodoxy has make a great blunder in the erroneous assumption that spiritual truth can be intellectually perceived. There have been far-reaching conditions resulting from this concept -- and they are showing in our preaching, our praying, our singing, our activity and our thinking.”

“I am positive that much that passes for the gospel in our day is very little more than a very mild case of orthodox religion grafted on to a heart that is sold out to the world in its pleasures and tastes and ambitions.”

“[The Church] has lived through its early travails and has now come to accept an easier way of life. It is content to carry on its painless program with enough money to pay its bills and a membership large enough to assure its future. Its members now look to it for security rather than for guidance in the battle between good and evil. It has become a school instead of a barracks. Its members are students, not soldiers. They study the experiences of others instead of seeking new experiences of their own.”

“The darkest hour is just before the dawn. It may be that this moment of discouragement which you are going through is preliminary to a sunburst of new and beautiful living, if you will follow on to know the Lord.”

“As the Good itself is only one thing, so it alone wishes to be what helps us along. But the Good is not something external to us, like a slave who comes against his will when the master uses the whip. The place and the path are within each of us. And just as the place is the blessed state of the striving soul, so the path is the striving soul's continual transformation.”

“Mind what you are about: labor faithfully in My vineyard: I will be your reward. Write, read, sing, lament, keep silence, pray, bear your crosses manfully: eternal life is worth all these, and greater combats....It is no small matter to lose or gain the kingdom of God. Lift up, therefore, thy face to Heaven; behold I and all My Saints with Me, who in this world have had a great conflict, now rejoice, are comforted now, are now secure, are now at rest; and they shall for all eternity abide with Me in the kingdom of My Father.”

“Through the entertainment of the ears, a weaker mind can rise up to devotional feeling. Yet when in my own case it happens that the song moves me more than the subject, I confess I've committed a punishable sin, and then I'd rather not hear someone singing.”

“Discipline is given to restrain the excesses of freedom”

“Observe this simple counsel of perfection: Forsake all, and you shall find all. Renounce desire, and you shall find peace. Give this due thought, and when you have put it into practice, you will understand all things.”

“The Didache is the earliest known document outside the NT to identify the problem of settled faith communities in conflict with traveling, itinerant preachers and prophets. The Didachist does not doubt the validity of such persons, but recognizes that not all of them are worthy witnesses to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Those who teach falsely for their own gain are identified as "Christ peddlars," a term known first from the Didache”

“In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.”

“Religion demands above all the concentration of the spirit...it is a thrusting into the unity of all things so as to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with the unity of the One from Whom it all comes.”

“I think that all things , in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not the least.”

“Tenemos que dar un rodeo, dejar las colinas y los bosques y volver a nuestros estudios, a la iglesia, a nuestra Biblia y a ponernos de rodillas. De otro modo, el amor por la naturaleza empezaría a convertirse en una religión de la naturaleza, y entonces, aun cuando no nos condujera a «los oscuros dioses de la sangre», nos llevaría a un alto grado de insensatez.”

“The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands - that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.”

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?”

“El tipo de gente que nos conviene que conozca: rica, de buen tono, superficialmente intelectual y brillantemente escéptica respecto a todo. Mediante el término puritanismo, rescatamos anualmente de la templanza, la castidad y la austeridad de vida a millares de humanos.”