I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays
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.
JOHN SELDEN, Table Talk, 1686
The nearer the Church the further from God.
LANCELOT ANDREWES, Sermon on the Nativity before James I
Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
LENNY BRUCE, The Essential Lenny Bruce
Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.
ANNE RICE, BookPage interview, Nov. 2005
Where Christ erecteth his church, the devil in the same churchyard will have his chapel.
RICHARD BANCROFT, sermon preached at Paul's Cross, Feb. 9, 1589
- Some keep the Sabbath going to church;
- I keep it staying at home,
- With a bobolink for a chorister,
- And an orchard for a dome.
EMILY DICKINSON, Some keep the Sabbath going to Church
The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached -- and against which he taught his disciples to fight.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, unpublished fragment, Nov. 1887
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
- The True Church can never fail
- For it is based upon a rock.
T.S. ELIOT, The Hippopotamus
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.
It wasn't that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone, it would be a tender and compassionate religion.... No, what Adelia objected to was the Church's interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, moneygrubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any inquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.
ARIANA FRANKLIN, Mistress of the Art of Death
The Church must be intelligible to the simple as well as to the shrewd.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON, A City Set on a Hill
I'm more spiritual than I am religious. I don't go to church; I go to the beach.
PAULA DEEN, Good Housekeeping, Nov. 2009
Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.
I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.
MARK TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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