Quotes by Clerics - Page 4

We would not listen to those who were wont to say the voice of the people is the voice of God for the voice of the mob is near akin to madness.
Alcuin
We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
Jonathan Swift
A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.
Thomas à Kempis
Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
Jonathan Swift
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'The first command was clear and absolute, unalterable and unchanging. But there was a loophole in the second--wiggle room if we do not love ourselves. So at dinner Jesus tightened the loop, closed the hole:'A new command I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you.
Thomas R. Steagald
Constantly choose rather to want less than to have more.
Thomas à Kempis
Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.
John Donne
Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.
Desmond Tutu
Those who attempt to search into the majesty of God will be overwhelmed with His Glory!
Thomas à Kempis
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
Jonathan Swift
My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity especially on the situation in Gaza shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma
Desmond Tutu
Love feels no burden regards not labors strives toward more than it attains argues not of impossibility since it believes that it may and can do all things. Therefore it avails for all things and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies helpless.
Thomas à Kempis
Yet nothing can to nothing fall,Nor any place be empty quite;Therefore I think my breast hath allThose pieces still, though they be not unite;And now, as broken glasses showA hundred lesser faces, soMy rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,But after one such love, can love no more.
John Donne
No great thing conies to any man unless he has courage.
Cardinal James Gibbons
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Jonathan Swift
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on Earth.
John Wesley
As learnèd commentators viewIn Homer more than Homer knew.
Jonathan Swift
111 company is like a dog who dirts those most whom he loves best.
Jonathan Swift
This is what healing demands. Behavior that is hurtful, shameful, abusive, or demeaning must be brought into the fierce light of truth, and truth can be brutal.
Desmond Tutu
Very few men properly speaking live at present but are providing to live another time.
Jonathan Swift
I'm not ok - you're not ok and that's ok.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin
Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
John Donne
Love is a mighty power, a great and complete good; Love alone lightens every burden, and makes the rough places smooth. It bears every hardship as though it were nothing, and renders all bitterness sweet and acceptable. The love of Jesus is noble, and inspires us to great deeds; it moves us always to desire perfection. Love aspires to high things, and is held back by nothing base. Love longs to be free, a stranger to every worldly desire, lest its inner vision become dimmed, and lest worldly self-interest hinder it or ill-fortune cast it down. Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller or better in heaven or earth; for love is born of God, and can rest only in God above all created things.Love flies, runs, leaps for joy; it is free and unrestrained. Love gives all for all, resting in One who is highest above all things, from whom every good flows and proceeds. Love does not regard the gifts, but turns to the Giver of all good gifts. Love knows no limits, but ardently transcends all bounds. Love feels no burden, takes no account of toil, attempts things beyond its strength; love sees nothing as impossible, for it feels able to achieve all things. Love therefore does great things; it is strange and effective; while he who lacks love faints and fails.
Thomas à Kempis
Reason is God's gift but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.
Cardinal Newman
If you bear the cross unwillingly you make it a burden and load yourself more heavily but you must bear it.
Thomas à Kempis
O! I shall soon despair, when I shall seeThat Thou lovest mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.
John Donne
Promise and pie-crust are made to be broken.
Jonathan Swift
All men desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace.
Thomas à Kempis
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
Jonathan Swift
Passion and prejudice govern the world only under the name of reason.
John Wesley
What thou art that thou art.
Thomas à Kempis
When I leave this earthly home and go up to God to dwell, someone will look on the heaped up grave and whisper, "She tried to do well.
Reverend Ada Slaton Bonds
See the Gospel Church secure And founded on a Rock! All her promises are sure Her bulwarks who can shock? Count her every precious shrine Tell to after-ages tell Fortified by power divine The Church can never fail.
Charles Wesley
True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.
John Donne
When the world has once begun to use us ill it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony as men do to a whore.
Jonathan Swift
When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Camara – one of the great prophets of Christian "Liberation theology".
Dom Helder Camara Archbishop of Recife in Brazil
At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
John Donne
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Jonathan Swift
How blest am I in this discovering thee!To enter in these bonds is to be free;Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
John Donne
In Fellowship alone To God with Faith draw near Approach His Courts besiege His Throne With all the power of Prayer.
Charles Wesley
In this confusion we begin to see what lies behind John Paul II's startling warning about democracy "effectively mov[ing] towards a form of totalitarianism." It begins to happen at a practical level when we simultaneously hold that rights which arise from the dignity of the person are also a matter of "bargaining." New rights can be claimed or created, and whatever privileges can be negotiated around them are then secured by reference to human dignity, even when these new rights are directly contrary to the human dignity of some, for example, the unborn or the elderly sick. This confusion about the nature of rights debases their currency and undermines the first principles of democracy. Such freedom gradually becomes a tyrannical "freedom of the 'the strong' against the weak, who have no choice but to submit.
George Cardinal Pell
If you cannot recollect yourself continuously, do so once a day at least, in the morning or in the evening. In the morning make a resolution and in the evening examine yourself on what you have said this day, what you have done and thought, for in these things perhaps you have often offended God and those about you.
Thomas à Kempis
I heard the little bird say so.
Jonathan Swift
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheares Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
John Donne
When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the people that I love, and all that I proclaim is words of doom and judgement.' And yet if I say "I will shut up", I can't.
Desmond Tutu
A humble knowledge of oneself is a surer road to God than a deep searching of the sciences.
Thomas à Kempis
We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another. We shrivel when we are not able to interact. I mean that is part of the reason why solitary confinement is such a horrendous punishment. We depend on the other in order for us to be fully who we are. (...) The concept of Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.
Desmond Tutu
Every conjecture we can form with regard to the works of God has as little probability as the conjectures of a child with regard to the works of a man.
Thomas Reid
May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
Keep us Lord so awake in the duties of our calling that we may sleep in thy peace and wake in thy glory.
John Donne
The voice of the people is the voice of God.
Alcuin
A person is a person through other persons.None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.
Desmond Tutu
A bride, before a "Good-night" could be said,Should vanish from her clothes into her bed,As souls from bodies steal, and are not spied.But now she's laid; what though she be?Yet there are more delays, for where is he?He comes and passeth through sphere after sphere;First her sheets, then her arms, then anywhere.Let not this day, then, but this night be thine;Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine.
John Donne
Wherever you go, there you are.
Thomas à Kempis
This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong artsMake of so noble individual partsOne fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.
John Donne
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.
John Donne
Be thine own palace or the world's thy jail.
John Donne
There was all the world and his wife.
Jonathan Swift
All kings and all their favourites All glory of honours beauties wits The sun itself which makes time as they pass Is elder by a year now than it was When thou and I first one another saw. All other things to their destruction draw Only our love hath no decay This no to-morrow hath nor yesterday Running it never runs from us away But truly keeps his first last everlasting day.
John Donne
The first springs of great events like those of great rivers are often mean and little.
Jonathan Swift