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Christianity Quotes

Jesus has the most entries, then Jefferson, Shakespeare, Augustine and C. S. Lewis. Critics get space too: Bertrand Russell in 1932 says Christianity gives reasons for not fearing death and so fails to teach the virtue of courage, and Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) asks whether a Christ must perish in every age. Disraeli’s Endymion (1880) has the shortest line on the page: his Christianity was muscular.

Gandhi’s “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians” is disputed, and the notes bring in the missionary E. Stanley Jones, who is said to have asked him a similar question. A line about the last stone of the last church, credited to Émile Zola, is traced to a Soviet popular-science book of 1959. The third disputed entry is an anti-Christian remark credited to Hitler.

Random quote on Christianity

Most quoted on christianity:

Before the christian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the divinity, and brought it somewhat nearer to us, there was very little said of the love of God. The followers of Plato have something of it, and only something. The other writes of pagan antiquity, whether poets or philosophers, nothing at all.

Edmund Burke A Philosphical Emquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Jesus taught the world nothing that had not been taught as earnestly before by other masters. He begins his sermon [on the Mount] with certain purely Buddhistic precepts that had found acceptance among the Essenes, and were generally practiced by the Orphikoi, and the Neo-platonists... Every word of his sermon is an echo of the essential principles of monastic Buddhism.

Helena Blavatsky Isis Unveiled Vol. 2 (1877)

The Old and the New Testament can be appreciated as stupendous achievements of the human mind, but this appreciation should not be used to suppress sexuality. My medical experience has taught me that adolescents who are sexually sick have an unhealthy appreciation of the legend of Jesus.

Wilhelm Reich The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered. (6)

Jesus

[It is necessary that the Christian] should distinguish himself from the crowd by a singular conduct; that he should walk almost alone along a by-lane, where he will have to suffer the scorn and sneers of false Christians.

François-Philippe Mésenguy Abrégé de l’Histoire de l’Ancien Testament (1747)

Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become "fools" so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness"

Paul of Tarsus

Christian mythology incorporated the cosmological theories current eighteen centuries ago. Dante found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his own day. Milton found it harder. Mr. Lewis finds it impossible.

J. B. S. Haldane review of C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (1946)

The name [Christians] was derived from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judæa. By that event the sect, of which he was the founder, received a blow, which, for a time, checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigour, not only in Judæa, the soil that gave it birth, but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which every thing infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world.

Tacitus

The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world.

Ammon Hennacy

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left
Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

Saint Patrick

All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and deceit. They have brought many unfortunate people into a state of poverty, especially the farmers, working class people and the very poor. Then as now Jews have to be reminded intermittently anew that they were enjoying rights in any country since they left Palestine and the Arabian desert, and subsequently their ethical and moral doctrines as well as their deeds rightly deserve to be exposed to criticism in whatever country they happen to live.

Pope Clement VIII

I say of Jesus, as all humanists do. "If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?"
But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.
I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.

Kurt Vonnegut A Man Without a Country (2005)

[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds] that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure.

Earl Doherty

Christians, be ye more serious in your movements;
Be ye not like a feather at each wind,
And think not every water washes you.
Ye have the Old and the New Testament,
And the Pastor of the Church who guideth you
Let this suffice you unto your salvation.
If evil appetite cry aught else to you,
Be ye as men, and not as silly sheep,
So that the Jew among you may not mock you.

Dante Alighieri

The condemnation of the wisest and most virtuous of the Pagans, on account of their ignorance or disbelief of the divine truth, seems to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age. But the primitive church, whose faith was of a much firmer consistence, delivered over, without hesitation, to eternal torture the far greater part of the human species.

Edward Gibbon

Because if this is gonna be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we've got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition — and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

Stephen Colbert

Enforced uniformity confounds civil and religious liberty and denies the principles of Christianity and civility. No man shall be required to worship or maintain a worship against his will.

Roger Williams The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom (1991)

Even of death Christianity has made a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the Pagan and the stoical repose of the Indian.

Ouida

You see few people here in America who really care very much about living a Christian life in a democratic world.

Clare Boothe Luce

Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin Living Words (1860)

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