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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:

Ye Heavens, how sang they in your courts,
How sang the angelic choir that day,
When from his tomb the imprisoned God,
Like the strong sunrise, broke away?

Frederick William Faber

A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world.

G. K. Chesterton Heretics (1905)

The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people he meets on the street for fear they may touch him.

Phillips Brooks

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendor soon or late
Will pierce the gloom; I shall emerge one day.

Robert Browning

Avoid all refined speculation; confine yourself to simple reflections, and recur to them frequently. Those who pass too rapidly from one truth to another feed their curiosity and restlessness; they even distract their intellect with too great a multiplicity of views. Give every truth time to send down deep root into the heart.

François Fénelon

Indeed, the resolution was to will to be victorious over one’s disposition and over one’s enemies by reconciliation; the resolution was that the evening of life should witness that there had been work during the day; the resolution was to lift up one’s soul over everything that was petty in life.

Søren Kierkegaard

I reflected how soon in the cup of desire
The pearl of the soul may be melted away;
How quickly, alas, the pure sparkle of fire
We inherit from heaven, may be quenched in the clay.

Thomas Moore

Her soul from earth to Heaven lies,
Like the ladder of the vision,
Wheron go
To and fro,
In ascension and demission,
Star-flecked feet of Paradise.

Francis Thompson

Intimations of Immortality
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

William Wordsworth

Buddhism does not demand blind faith from its adherents. Here mere belief is dethroned and is substituted by confidence based on knowledge. ... The confidence placed by a follower on the Buddha is like that of a sick person in a noted physician, or a student in his teacher.

Narada Maha Thera

Now let the heavens be joyful,
Let earth her song begin;
Let the round world keep triumph,
And all that is therein;
Invisible and visible,
Their notes let all things blend,
For Christ the Lord is risen
Our joy that hath no end.

John of Damascus

Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child.

Billy Crystal

I long to believe in immortality. I shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy with you here — how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality — I wish to live with you forever.

John Keats

Of such as he was, there be few on earth;
Of such as he is, there are few in Heaven:
And life is all the sweeter that he lived,
And all he loved more sacred for his sake:
And Death is all the brighter that he died,
And Heaven is all the happier that he's there.

Gerald Massey

The second half of the first millennium BCE was the period that created many of the ideological and institutional elements that characterize later Indian religions. The renouncer tradition played a central role during this formative period of Indian religious history.

Gavin Flood

Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. Although the fullness of consciousness is already there as the unmanifested, we are here to bring consciousness into this dimension....

Eckhart Tolle A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005)

Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?

Søren Kierkegaard Works of Love (1847)

The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all than you encounter.

Morihei Ueshiba Inspire! What Great Leaders Do (2004)

Antony ... used to say that it behooved a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body, yet to grant a short space to the body through its necessities; but all the more earnestly to give up the whole remainder to the soul and seek its profit, that it might not be dragged down by the pleasures of the body, but, on the contrary, the body might be in subjection to the soul.

Athanasius of Alexandria

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