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Easter Quotes

The sources for this page are the faith, hope and spirituality pages, not a collection of Easter writing. A few entries do mention the day: Longfellow’s The Spanish Student (1843) sets a scene on a bright Easter Sunday with blossoming trees, and W. H. Auden, in A Certain World (1970), says Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry but Good Friday cannot, any more than Auschwitz.

Most of what else you find here is general. Expect devotional writers and poets, with sources and dates on every quote page. Anything flagged as disputed or misattributed carries a note that says what the editors turned up.

Random quote on Easter

Most quoted on easter:

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

Walt Whitman

Enlightenment should also be enjoyable.

Saul Bellow his Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988)

Death has no power the immortal soul to slay, That, when its present body turns to clay, Seeks a fresh home, and with unlessened might Inspires another frame with life and light.

John Dryden

Annie Besant’s book where she put forward the idea that theosophical mystical energies could be portrayed as colours or abstract shapes was practically the invention of abstract art.

Alan Moore De Abaitua interview (1998)

As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!

Leon Trotsky

I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine; enquire. Look into the nature of things.

Frances Wright A Course of Popular Lectures (1829)

A physical man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot get to know [them], because they are examined spiritually. However, the spiritual man examines indeed all things, but he himself is not examined by any man.

Paul of Tarsus

I don't actually have anything against anybody, unless their belief precludes everybody else's. … I am an atheist and an absurdist and I have been for many years. I've actually taken a huge amount of flack for that.

Joss Whedon

I see magic as a vantage point from which one can look down on the rest of consciousness.

Alan Moore De Abaitua interview (1998)

Tell me why the caged bird nutters against its prison bars, and I will tell you why the soul sickens of earthliness. The bird has wings, and wings were made to cleave the air, and soar in freedom in the sun. The soul is immortal — it cannot feed upon husks.

Randolph Sinks Foster Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

The greatest action is not conforming with the world's ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.

Atiśa Perspectives on Mankind's Search for Meaning (2008)

Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.

Terry Pratchett Sourcery (1988)

If you have any faith, give me, for heaven's sake, a share of it! Your doubts you may keep to yourself, for I have a plenty of my own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

That which is the foundation of all our hopes and of all our fears; all our hopes and fears which are of any consideration: I mean a Future Life.

Joseph Butler

Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Flight to Arras (1942)

The law of nations is founded upon reason and justice, and the rules of conduct governing individual relations between citizens or subjects of a civilized state are equally applicable as between enlightened nations.

Grover Cleveland

No; I don't see any mechanism that would make it possible. However, I'm always paraphrasing J.B.S. Haldane, "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine."

Arthur C. Clarke

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10 000 years ago.

John Maynard Keynes

Ecosystems majorly shape culture — but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.

Robert Sapolsky Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)

A Nursery Magician took
All little children by the hand:
And led them laughing through the book
Where Alice walks in Wonderland.

Henry Savile Clarke A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to his Child-Friends (1933)

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