Browsing Topic Best Clergymen Quotes

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

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

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

A man’s free will cannot cure him even of the toothache, or a sore finger; and yet he madly thinks it is in its power to cure his soul.

Upon the present occasion London was full of clergymen. The specially clerical clubs, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Old University, and the Athenaeum, were black with them.

I questioned the faithful of all communions; I particularly sought the society of clergymen, who are the depositories of the various creeds and have a personal interest in their survival … all thought the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.

My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way since it was now resolved I should not be a clergyman.

The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

Anyone who makes a decision at our meetings is seen later and referred to a local clergyman, Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish.

When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England.

Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.

When a minister or a clergyman takes seriously unfashionable Christian doctrines which condemn sex outside marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and feminism, and injects his views into the political debate, he is immediately denounced as a ‘reactionary.’

I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman’s family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

[Regarding] the convention that clergymen are more virtuous than other men. Any average selection of mankind, set apart and told that it excels the rest in virtue, must tend to sink below the average.

The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people’s private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen.

The worst that one can say of the Christian clergyman today is that he actually believes what he teaches.

If we are now holding late-night talk-show hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen, I’m out. I’m gone.

It is indeed time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join forces.

The Church has been reproached with endeavouring to appropriate to itself all those professorships in our Universities which are connected with science: it is however certain that the larger portion of these ill-remunerated offices have been filled by clergymen.

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.

The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

The capitalist has this over the politician and the clergyman; he has in practice done more to raise the standard of living of the poor than all the government and church programs in history….Monsanto and the Archer Daniels Midland Company have fed more hungry people than all the…soup kitchens combined.

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.

Clergymen tend to be unreliable and pompous figures. Seldom Jewish rabbis, less often Catholic priests, but Protestant ministers tend to be… not really very admirable. Not necessarily evil, but silly. And wrong, of course.

It has always been my belief that children inherit the suppressed tendencies of their parents. A clergyman’s son frequently shows abnormal tastes for the pleasures that his father denied himself.

Clergymen have much the same in their breeches as other men.

There is a species of person called a ‘Modern Churchman’ who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.

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.

Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.

The next time a prostitute solicits your business, ask for the clergyman’s rate.

The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God’s creative genius is endless.

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.