Quotes on Clergymen

When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

There's nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule-and I shouldn't ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn't venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.

I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?

To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.

You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.

The carnal person fears man, not God. The strong Christian fears God, not man. The weak Christian fears man too much, and God too little.

I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.

No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.

For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.

Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.

It is indolence... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. .... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?

Although my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.

Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

I believe in an America where the rights that I have described are enjoyed by all, regardless of their race or their creed or their national origin - where every citizen is free to think and speak as he pleases and write and worship as he pleases - and where every citizen is free to vote as he pleases, without instructions from anyone, his employer, the union leader or his clergyman.

CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of better his temporal ones.

What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.

An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

A man who is good enough to go to heaven is good enough to be a clergyman.