Quotes by Ministers - Page 4

This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.
Malcolm X
Where's your church?""We're standing in it.""But this is a bookstore and it's a Friday.""Yes, but you might also choose to see it as a cathedral of the human spirit-a storehouse consecrated to the full spectrum of human experience. Just about every idea we've ever had is in here somewhere. A place containing great thinking is a sacred space.
Forrest Church
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.
George MacDonald
I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.
Malcolm X
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.
Malcolm X
Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.
Norman Vincent Peale
You must give him time,' said her grandmother;'and you must be content not to be believed for a while. It is very hard to bear; but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it yet. I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end. You must let him go now.
George MacDonald
A friend is someone with whom you dare to be yourself.
Frank Crane
You're looking at the face of a black man who hates nobody.
Martin Luther King Sr.
It is possible for a Christian to be perfectly orthodox and yet to be defeated, and to be living a defeated and a useless life.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—-Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—-if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them.
George MacDonald
When you wholeheartedly adopt a "with all your heart" attitude and go all out with the positive principle you can do incredible things.
Norman Vincent Peale
This is a sane wholesome practical working faith: That it is a man's business to do the will of God second that God himself takes on the care of that man and third that therefore that man ought never to be afraid of anything.
George MacDonald
It is not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God.
George MacDonald
A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.
George MacDonald
Belief compelled through fear is not belief, it is blind and forced obedience.
Carlton D. Pearson
...To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, ‘I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;’ to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary,—this is the victory that overcometh the world.To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream;to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose;—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.‘I am weak,’ says the true soul, ‘but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep!
George MacDonald
I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.
George MacDonald
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong. Than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
Malcolm X
Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies. (from "Loving Your Enemies")
Martin Luther King Jr.
No good ever comes of pride, for it is the meanest of mean things, and no one but he who is full of it thinks it grand.
George MacDonald
We are forever becoming! We never arrive, as long as we are on this side of Heaven there is more to learn.
DeBorrah K. Ogans
There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.
Thomas Higginson
She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which believes himself the best, wisest, and loveliest being in the world, yea, the very centre of the universe. And so they run about for ever looking for their own shadows that they may worship them, and miserable because they cannot find them, being themselves too near the ground to have any shadows; and what becomes of them at last, there is but one who knows.
George MacDonald
Obedience is the opener of eyes.
George MacDonald
Betty's a good Muslim woman and wife. I don't imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job
Malcolm X
That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influences of the Devil.
Cotton Mather
I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.''No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.''But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. . . . It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest.
George MacDonald
The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.
George MacDonald
Here is one great name - Jehovah-jireh. You will find it in the story of Abraham going up into that mountain to sacrifice his only son Isaac. He was on the point of striking his son when suddenly God stopped him and said, 'Do not strike him, I have another offering.' And Abraham found a ram in the thicket. The Lord had provided the offering and the sacrifice, so he gave that name, 'The Lord Will Provide'. And so, whenever you go into the presence of God, whatever your need may be, whatever form the need may be taking, remind yourself that you are praying to Jehovah-jireh, the Lord who has promised to provide. He will be with you for He says, 'I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee' (Josh 1:5).
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end.
George MacDonald
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors – in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven! The miracle is that the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders’, his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now.
Malcolm X
Each morning puts man on trial and each evening passes judgement.
Roy L. Smith
Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate. So practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart develop the happiness habit and life will become a continual feast.
Norman Vincent Peale
If a man harbors any sort of fear it percolates through all his thinking damages his personality makes him landlord to a ghost.
Lloyd C. Douglas
Thus his belief was that in a service where feeling could be restrained it ought to be restrained. The power of God was more likely to be known in a solemn stillness than amid noise and excitement. Silence and an expectant seriousness, born of a realisation of the nearness of God, were striking characteristics of the services at Sandfields.
Iain H. Murray
At the very time when we have been boasting of our enlightenment and knowledge and understanding, there is this tragic breakdown in personal relationships. ... For instance, we now have to have Marriage Guidance classes. Up to this century men and women were married without this expert advice which now seems to be so essential.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself—believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all.
George MacDonald
Forgiveness is all-powerful. Forgiveness heals all ills.
Catherine Ponder
Hoarded things might easily become a menace; a mere fire-and-theft risk; a breeding-ground for destructive insects; a source of worry. Men would have plenty of anxieties, but there was no sense in accumulating worries over THINGS! That kind of worry destroyed your character. Even an unused coat, hanging in your closet—it wasn't merely a useless thing that did nobody any good; it was an active agent of destruction to your life. And your LIFE must be saved, at all costs. What would it advantage a man—Jesus had demanded—if he were to gain the whole world, and lose his own life?
Lloyd C. Douglas
It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.
Malcolm X
Many people in this country who want to see us the minority, and who don’t want to see us taking too militant or too uncompromising a stand, are absolutely against the successful regrouping or organising of any faction in this country whose thought and whose thinking pattern is international rather than national… There’s a world wide revolution going on, it goes beyond Mississippi, it goes beyond Alabama, it goes beyond Harlem. What is it revolting against? The power structure. The American power structure? No. The French power structure? No. The English power structure? No. Then, what power structure? An international Western power structure.
Malcolm X
Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue.
George MacDonald
If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
Malcolm X
It is the great business of every Christian to save souls. People complain that they do not know how to take hold of this matter. Why, the reason is plain enough; they have never studied it. They have never taken the proper pains to qualify themselves for the work. If you do not make it a matter of study, how you may successfully act in building up the kingdom of Christ, you are acting a very wicked and absurd part as a Christian.
Charles Grandison Finney
I do believe in hell as a state of being or consciousness, and I believe that people can dwell in hell and that many do, right now, today, on this earth before rather than after death. I will argue ... that hell is the most erroneous, oudated, misunderstood, and misguided dogma in all of Christianity, and the one that must be discarded if this spiritual tradition is to survive as anything more than a contemptable curiosity.
Carlton D. Pearson
...he believed in God and he believed that when the human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own.
George MacDonald
Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.
Norman Vincent Peale
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
Malcolm X
Fear is the paralyzing emotion that inhibits or restricts normal feelings of love, confidence, and well-being.
Tim LaHaye
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who is for or against it.
Malcolm X
All I know is that the closer I get to God, the deeper I get into the Bible, and the heavier the burden seems on my shoulders.
Tim LaHaye
It was not a bed with curtains, but a bed with doors like shutters. This may not seem like a nice way of having a bed, but we would all be glad of the wooden curtains about us at night if we lived in such a cottage, on the side of a hill along which the wind swept like a wild river. Through the cottage it would be streaming all night long. And a poor woman with a cough, or a man who has been out in the cold all day, is very glad of such a place to lie in, and leave the the rest of the house to the wind and the fairies.
George MacDonald
Alas, how easily things go wrong!A sigh too much, a kiss too longAnd there follows a mist and a weeping rainAnd life is never the same again
George MacDonald
How easy it is to read the Scriptures and give a kind of nominal assent to the truth and yet never to appropriate what it tells us!
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
But Mary had not come into the world to be sad or to help another to be sad. Sorrowful we may often have to be, but to indulge in sorrow is either not to know or to deny God our Saviour. True, her heart ached for Letty; and the ache immediately laid itself as close to Letty's ache as it could lie; but that was only the advance-guard of her army of salvation, the light cavalry of sympathy: the next division was help; and behind that lay patience, and strength, and hope, and faith,and joy. This last, modern teachers, having failed to regard it as a virtue, may well decline to regard as a duty; but he is a poor Christian indeed in whom joy has not at least a growing share, and Mary was not a poor Christian--at least, for the time she had been learning, and as Christians go in the present aeon of their history.
George MacDonald
If you want a sense of purpose for experiencing pressures, use your knowledge of Jesus Christ's comforting, enlivening, energizing presence to be a comfort to others.
William P. Barker
If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.
Norman Vincent Peale
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But...the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?
Martin Luther King Jr.
...as no one can be just without love, so no one can truly report without understanding.
George MacDonald