Famous Quotes & Sayings

George MacDonald

We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.

George MacDonald

The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. . . . Every time we find our hearts are troubled, that we are not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth.

George MacDonald

I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.

George MacDonald

This is a wise, sane Christian faith: that a man commit himself, his life, and his hopes to God; that God undertakes the special protection of that man; that therefore that man ought not to be afraid of anything.

George MacDonald

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

George MacDonald

If we knew as much about heaven as God does, we would clap our hands every time a Christian dies.

George MacDonald

The kingdom of heaven is not come even when God's will is our law; it is fully come when God's will is our will.

George MacDonald

"But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?" I answer, "What if He knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need - the need of Himself?"

George MacDonald

No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire.

Emanuel Swedenborg

In the Christian world... it is believed that angels were created at the beginning, and that heaven was formed of them; and that the Devil or Satan was an angel of light, who, becoming rebellions, was cast down with his crew, and that this was the origin of hell.

Emanuel Swedenborg

For the judgment was accomplished not only upon all the men of the Christian church, but also upon all who are called Mohammedans, and, moreover, upon all the Gentiles in the whole world.

Elliott Abrams

Persecution of Christians is growing around the world, and Congress needs to pay more attention to it.

Ellie Goulding

Christmas in L.A. is weird. There's no snow. It's not even cold.

Ellen Hopkins

Freedom is a double-edged ideal, because true freedom comes without the protection of laws that also enslave us by defining us--female, male; Christian, Islamic; good, evil. All at the whim of a frail minority.

Elizabeth Goudge

There always comes, I think, a sort of peak in suffering at which either you win over your pain or your pain wins over you, according as to whether you can, or cannot, call up that extra ounce of endurance that helps you to break through the circle of yourself and do the hitherto impossible. That extra ounce carries you through 'le dernier quart d' heure.' Psychologist have a name for it, I believe. Christians call it the Grace of God.

Elizabeth Gilbert

In every possible instance Saint Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves to contain their carnal yearnings to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven. "But if they cannot contain " Paul finally conceded then "let them marry for it is better to marry than to burn." Which is perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history.

Elaine Pagels

Jesus Christ rose from the grave.' With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical.

Elaine Pagels

Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy?

Elaine Pagels

Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? . . . these religious debates - questions of the nature of God, or of Christ - simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.'

Elaine Pagels

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.

Elaine Pagels

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members.

Elaine Pagels

What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.

Elaine Pagels

Christians have ... identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan... Nor have things improved since. The blood-soaked history of persecution, torture, murder, and destruction perpetrated in the name of religion is difficult to grasp, let alohne summarize, from the slaughter of Christians to the Crusades to the Inquisitiion to the Reformation to the European witchcraze to colonialization to today's bitter coflict in the Middle East.

John Bunyan

To pray rightly, you must make God your hope, stay, and all. Right prayer sees nothing substantial or worth being concerned about except God.

John Bunyan

Thou art beaten that thou mayest be better.

John Bunyan

Therefore, I bind these lies and slanderous accusations to my person as an ornament; it belongs to my Christian profession to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled, and since all this is nothing but that, as God and my conscience testify, I rejoice in being reproached for Christ's sake.

John Bunyan

Take heed of driving so hard after this world, as to hinder thyself and family from those duties towards God, which thou art by grace obliged to; as private prayer, reading the scriptures, and Christian conference. It is a base thing for men so to spend themselves and families after this world, as that they disengage their heart to God's worship.

Joel Osteen

When you give up yourself, that's when you will feel the true spirit of Christmas. And that's giving that's serving others and that's when you feel fulfilled.

Jim Rogers

When things go wrong on a macroeconomic level, it's almost always this way. People find someone to blame, whether it's blacks, whites, Christians, Jews, Muslims-whoever.

Madison Smartt Bell

I dont call myself a very good Christian, but I think I know one when I see one, and I also think I know when I dont.

Madeleine L'Engle

We live by revelations, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget all the questions and we become like the pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.

Lucy Hale

My favorite toy growing up was Polly Pocket. But one gift that I wanted though never received for Christmas was a pair of trampoline moon shoes. You strap them to your feet and they have springs on them, and you can just jump around!

Lucy Hale

I was lucky enough to grow up in a home where I woke up Christmas morning and had toys. I know that's not the case with all people and I don't think kids should go without experiencing that sort of joy.