Christianity Quotes

“Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”

“At the top of the hill stood a cross, and a little below at the bottom was a stone tomb. In my dream, just as Christian came up to the cross his burden loosened from his shoulders and fell off his back. It tumbled and continued to do so down the hill until it came to the mouth of the tomb where it fell inside and was seen no more.”

″ A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.”

“Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.”

“When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.”

“The way we live ought to manifest the truth of what we believe. A messy life speaks of a messy and incoherent faith.”

“Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.”

“There are Christians and then there are Christians.”

“The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; .... The first question I ask about these promises is: “Why any of them except the first?” Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? For it must be true, as an old writer says, that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”

“Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.”

“The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakes, my desire. And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself.”

“What God gives in answer to our prayers will always be the thing we most urgently need, and it will always be sufficient.”

“Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity - and possibly nowhere else. If that were certain, it would be proof of a very high order″

“The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians - when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.”

“Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs.”

“I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughter of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved.”

“Christians are like manure: spread them out and they help everything grow better, but keep them in one big pile and they stink horribly.”

“They also said that slavery was good for us because it taught us to be good Christians—like the white people.” She sighed deeply, her voice fading into a distant whisper. “But they didn’t teach us Christianity to save our souls, but to teach us obedience. They were afraid of slave revolts and they wanted us to learn the Bible’s teachings about slaves being loyal to their masters.”

“Let the strong and mighty laugh at men like me: let us, the weak and the poor, confess our sins to you.”

“This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

“The deed is done and taking another life cannot change it. Instead, let us forgive as God would have us do. It is not right that we hold a grudge in our hearts. The doer of the act is going to find it difficult indeed to live with himself. His only peace of mind will be when he goes to God for forgiveness.” Let us not stand in the way but instead give prayers that he may find his peace. ”

“There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.”

“For, feeling it their duty, a Christian task, these men had volunteered to clean certain of the fourteen rooms in the main house.”

“There is a longing in us all to be God-enthralled.”

“To love the enemy and to find some spaciousness for the victimizer, as well as the victim, resembles more the expansive compassion of God.”

“But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.”

“God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.”

“Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us—a crucified God—must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.”

“God without Christ is no God.”

“You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.”

“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.”

“The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.”

″‘The thing I like,’ said Hazel, ‘is they all speak English and they’re all Christians. That makes things so much easier.‘”

“The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.”

“We may speak about a place where there are no tears, no death, no fear, no night; but those are just the benefits of heaven. The beauty of heaven is seeing God.”

“God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him”

“Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.”

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.”

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

“The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.”

“Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exists without the weak.”

“The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.”

“The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us.”

“When we received forgiveness instead of judgment, we, too, were made ready to forgive the brethren. What God did to us, we then owed to others.”

“At the threshold of the new day stands the Lord who made it.”

“The individual must realize that his hours of aloneness react upon the community. In his solitude he can sunder and besmirch the fellowship, or he can strengthen and hallow it.”

“He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

“Nothing can be more cruel than the tenderness that consigns another to his sin. Nothing can be more compassionate the the severe rebuke that calls a brother back from the path of sin.”

“We do not have the ability in ourselves to accomplish the least of God’s tasks. This is the law of grace. ”

“A stone had been dropped into the well, the well was my youthful soul. And for a very long time this matter of Cain, the fratricide, and the ‘mark’ formed the point of departure for all my attempts at comprehension, my doubts and my criticism.”

“Can you imagine how far they have come?”

“Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men’s passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination.”

“Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.”

“The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.”

″ ‘Why, David,’ said [Alan], ‘the innocent have aye a chance to get assoiled in court; but for the lad that shot the bullet, I think the best place for him will be the heather. Them that havenae dipped their hands in any little difficulty, should be very mindful of the case of them that have. And that is the good Christianity. For if it was the other way round about, and the lad whom I couldnae just clearly see had been in our shoes, and we in his (as might very well have been), I think we would be a good deal obliged to him oursel’s if he would draw the soldiers.’ ”

“Man Alan,” said I, “ye are neither very wise nor very Christian to blow off so many words of anger. They will do the man ye call the Fox no harm, and yourself no good. Tell me your tale plainly out. What did he next?” ” ‘And that’s a good observe, David,’ said Alan. ‘Troth and indeed, they will do him no harm; the more’s the pity! And barring that about Christianity (of which my opinion is quite otherwise, or I would be nae Christian), I am much of your mind.’ ‘Opinion here or opinion there,’ said I, ‘it’s a kent thing that Christianity forbids revenge.’ ‘Ay’ said he, ‘it’s well seen it was a Campbell taught ye! It would be a convenient world for them and their sort, if there was no such a thing as a lad and a gun behind a heather bush!’ ”

“I envy thee not thy faith, which is ever in thy mouth, but never in thy heart nor in thy practice.”

“There, that cloud contains the Turks, the real Turks, and these men next to me, spitting tobacco, are veterans of Christendom, and this bugle now sounding its attack, the first attack in my life, and this roaring and shaking, this shooting star plunging to earth and treated with languid irritation by veterans and horses is a cannon ball, the first enemy cannon ball I’ve ever seen. May it not be the day when I’ll say- ‘And it’s my last.‘”

I never knew before that religion was such a cheerful thing. I always thought it was kind of melancholy, but Mrs. Allan’s isn’t, and I’d like to be a Christian if I could be one like her

“That dreadful night when he lay in the Garden of Gethsemane and writhed in agony until he sweat blood—

“If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?” And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.

“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.”