Quotes by Bishops - Page 2

How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination?
Jeremy Collier
The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is.
John Lancaster Spalding
Orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy.
William Warburton
The inexorable boredom that is at the core of life.
Jacques-Binigne Bossuet
We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us.
John Lancaster Spalding
He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.
Beilby Porteous
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly as we wake or sleep we grow strong or weak and at last some crisis shows what we have become.
Brooke Foss Westcott
Life has no smooth road for any of us and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps 'til the legend "over steep ways to the stars " fulfills self.
W. C. Doane
Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.
St. Francis de Sales
Reading that pleases and profits, that together delights and instructs, has all that one should desire.
Jacques Amyot
You can not love someone you do not appreciate and you can not appreciate what you do not see.
Bishop Ronnie Crudup
I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was cold and you clothed me; come, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.' He who is the the King of the poor and of kings will say this at His great judgment.
Francis de Sales
Examine your heart often to see if it is such toward your neighbor as you would like his to be toward you were you in his place. This is the touchstone of true reason.
Francis de Sales
Ought we not to love dearly the neighbor, who truly represents to us the sacred Person of our Master? And is this not one of the most powerful motives we could have for loving each other with an ardently burning love?
Francis de Sales
The Holy Spirit does not intervene a posteriori within the framework of Christology, as a help in overcoming the distance between an objectively existing Christ and ourselves; he is the one who gives birth to Christ and to the whole activity of salvation, by anointing Him and making him Χριστὸς (Luke 4.13). If it is truly possible to confess Christ as the truth, this is only because of the Holy Spirit (I For. 12.3). And as a careful study of I Cor. 12 shows, for St. Paul the body of Christ is literally composed of the charismata of the Spirit (charisma = membership of the body). So we can say without risk of exaggeration that Christ exists only pneumatologically, whether in His distinct personal particularity or in His capacity as the body of the Church and the recapitulation of all things.
John D. Zizioulas
[The Holy Spirit] is present as a whole to each and wholly present everywhere. He is portioned out impassably and participated in as a whole. He is like a sunbeam whose grace is present to the one who enjoys him as if he were present to such a one alone, and still he illuminates land and sea and is mixed with the air. Just so, indeed, the Spirit is present to each one who is fit to receive him, as if he were present to him alone, and still he sends out his grace that is complete and sufficient for all. The things that participate in him enjoy him to the extent that their nature allows, not to the extent that his power allows.
Basil the Great
Frequently give up some of your property by giving it with a generous heart to the poor ... It is true that God will repay us not only in the next world but even in this.
Francis de Sales
If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you and the other to the man with no shirt.
Ambrose of Milan
The greatest weakness of all is the great fear of appearing weak.
Jacques Benigne Bossuel
{President] Kayibanda's government [in Rwanda] continued the persecution against the Tutsis and began to make use of the media it controlled to launch a propaganda campaign against us. In a country where more than half the people cannot read or write and very few have televisions, radio is the dominant media. The fact that some newspapers were still printing the truth didn't matter much to the part of the population that couldn't read.Most of the literate people were already politically aware. While an educated person might question what they read or hear from the media, the uneducated tend to accept it. The uneducated are more easily affected by threats and the emotional trauma that propaganda like this can create.
John Rucyahana
It is a persistent evil to persecute a man who belongs to the grace of God. It is a calamity without remedy to hate the happy.
Cyprian
It is bad enough to be unconverted and going to hell. It is even worse to say, “I know it and will not cry for mercy.
J.C. Ryle
There are two sorts of good wills. The one says, "I would do well, but it gives me trouble, and I will not do it." The other, "I wish to do well, but I have not as much power as I have will; it is this which holds me back." The first fills Hell, the second Paradise.
Francis de Sales
If God has given you a mission, you must be tough enough to handle what people say and still not be distracted while doing what you were created to do. Are you tough enough? God and the enemy know the truth about you, and remember even great people doing great things for great causes meet negative criticisms. All criticism is not bad, just like all flattery is not good. Many times people don’t criticize you because they are evil; they do it because they have been trained to think anyone who doesn't perceive and see things in the same manner is an enemy. The critic is a prisoner to his own experiences and perspectives, erroneously believing his limited experiences are the sum of all truth. When you acknowledge your critics, you give them your power and validate their words. They are not important until you respond.
Bishop T.D.Jakes
Like infants, when they are born into the world, God's children are not born again in the full possession of their spiritual faculties; and it is well and wisely ordered that it is so. What we win easily, we seldom value sufficiently. The very fact that believers have to struggle and fight hard before they get hold of real soundness in the faith, helps to make them prize it more when they have attained it. The truths that cost us a battle are precisely those which we grasp most firmly, and never let go.
J.C. Ryle
The whole world is not worth one soul.
Francis de Sales
Sometimes what makes us insecure and vulnerable becomes the fuel we need to be overachievers. The antidote for a snakebite is made from the poison, and the thing that made you go backward is the same force that will push you forward.
T.D. Jakes
One of the best exercises in meekness we can perform is when the subject Is in ourselves. We must not fret over our own imperfections. Although reason requires that we must be displeased and sorry whenever we commit a fault we must refrain from bitter, gloomy,spiteful, and emotional displeasure. Many people are greatly at fault in this way. When overcome by anger they become angry at being angry, disturbed at being disturbed and vexed at being vexed. By such means they keep their hearts drenched and steeped in passion.
Francis de Sales
Progress apart from purpose ends in arrogance.
T.D. Jakes
Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.
Gregory of Nyssa
To those of us who often procrastinate on the decision we feel intimidated by lack of education or any area of weakness. I relieve you with this statement: It is not how much you know that arms you with the tools of great decision making, but rather how much you ask. Ask questions.
T.D. Jakes
It is not possible to say too much about Christ. But it is quite possible to say too little about hell.
J.C. Ryle
For truly barren is profane education, which is always in labor but never gives birth. For what fruit worthy of such pangs does philosophy show for being so long in labor? Do not all who are full of wind and never come to term miscarry before they come to the light of the knowledge of God, although they could as well become men if they were not altogether hidden in the womb of barren wisdom?
Gregory of Nyssa
Discussion of theology is not for everyone, I tell you, not for everyone-it is no such inexpensive or effortless pursuit. Nor, I would add, is it for every occasion, or every audience; neither are all its aspects open to inquiry. It must be reserved for certain occasions, for certain audiences, and certain limits must be observed. It is not for all people, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and, more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing purification of body and soul. For one who is not pure to lay hold of pure things is dangerous, just as it is for weak eyes to look at the sun's brightness. What is the right time? Whenever we are free from the mire and noise without, and our commanding faculty is not confused by illusory, wandering images, leading us, as it were, to mix fine script with ugly scrawling, or sweet-smelling scent with slime. We need actually "to be still" in order to know God, and when we receive the opportunity, "to judge uprightly" in theology. Who should listen to discussions of theology? Those for whom it is a serious undertaking, not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are people who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements. What aspects of theology should be investigated, and to what limit? Only aspects within our grasp, and only to the limit of the experience and capacity of our audience. Just as excess of sound or food injures the hearing or general health, or, if you prefer, as loads that are too heavy injure those who carry them, or as excessive rain harms the soil, we too must guard against the danger that the toughness, so to speak, of our discourses may so oppress and overtax our hearers as actually to impair the powers they had before.
Gregory of Nazianzus
Jesus didn't die as a frustrated failed revolutionary. His death was the revolution.
William H. Willimon
In the Eucharist we can find all the dimensions of communion: God communicates himself to us, we enter into communion with him, the participants of the sacrament enter into communion with one another, and creation as a whole enters through man into communion with God. All this takes place in Christ and the Spirit, who brings the last days into history and offers to the world a foretaste of the Kingdom.
John D. Zizioulas
Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages—which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption—symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos—spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.
Robert E. Barron
The practice of perfect virtue does not require teaching, but instructs others.
Ambrose of Milan
Our vision is often more abstracted by what we think we know than by our lack of knowledge.
Krister Stendahl
I pray to God to give me perseverance and to deign that I be a faithful witness to Him to the end of my life for my God.
St. Patrick
Despite our earnest efforts, we couldn't climb all the way up to God. So what did God do? In an amazing act of condescension, on Good Friday, God climbed down to us, became one with us. The story of divine condescension begins on Christmas and ends on Good Friday. We thought, if there is to be business between us and God, we must somehow get up to God. Then God came down, down to the level of the cross, all the way down to the depths of hell. He who knew not sin took on our sin so that we might be free of it. God still stoops, in your life and mine, condescends. “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” he asked his disciples, before his way up Golgotha. Our answer is an obvious, “No!” His cup is not only the cup of crucifixion and death, it is the bloody, bloody cup that one must drink if one is going to get mixed up in us. Any God who would wander into the human condition, any God who has this thirst to pursue us, had better not be too put off by pain, for that's the way we tend to treat our saviors. Any God who tries to love us had better be ready to die for it. As Chesterton writes, “Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate … Real love has always ended in bloodshed.
William H. Willimon
Get Ready, Get Ready!
Bishop T.D.Jakes
If everything is mission, nothing is mission.
Stephen Neill
If we walk steadily and faithfully...God will lift us up to greater things.
Francis de Sales
Everybody finds themselves sometimes deficient in what they need, and put to inconvenience ... the richest people may easily be without something they want, and that is practically to suffer poverty. Accept such occurrences cheerfully, rejoice in them, bear them willingly.
Francis de Sales
Take patiently the petty annoyances, the trifling discomforts, the unimportant losses which come upon all of us daily; for by means of these little matters, lovingly and freely accepted, you will give Him your whole heart, and win His.
Francis de Sales
God's favor floats as it were over all this and finds joy in turning all those miseries to the greater profit of those who love Him. From toil He makes patience spring forth.
Francis de Sales
During the night we must wait for the light.
Francis de Sales
Never be hurried in anything. Do all things calmly and in a spirit of repose. Do not lose your inward peace even if everything seems to be going wrong. What is anything in life compared to peace of soul?
Francis de Sales
He would never exhort the faithful to persevere if he were not ready to give them the power to do so.
Francis de Sales
He will unfailingly be pleased with our patience and take note of our diligence and perseverance.
Francis de Sales
Be patient and one day you will be in Heaven, where there will be only peace and joy ... You will possess an enduring tranquility and rest.
Francis de Sales
Oppose vigorously any tendency to sadness ... You must persevere. By means of sorrow the enemy tries to make us weary of good works, but if he sees that we don't give them up and that being done in spite of his opposition they have become very meritorious, he will stop troubling us.
Francis de Sales
We must unceasingly ask for [perseverance] by making use of the means which God has taught us for obtaining it: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, frequenting the sacraments, association with good companions, and hearing and reading Holy Scripture.
Francis de Sales
Fits of anger, vexation,and bitterness against ourselves tend to pride and they spring from no other source than self-love, which is disturbed and upset at seeing that it is imperfect.
Francis de Sales
Truly it is a blessed thing to love on earth as we hope to love in Heaven, and to begin that friendship here which is to endure for ever there.
Francis de Sales
I am a daughter, a son of God's, part of God's royal family. In the perspective of eternity, many things of this world are petty, beneath me: Vulgarity, stinginess, greed, grudges.
Ken Untener
If I do not feel a sense of joy in God's creation, if I forget to offer the world back to God with thankfulness, I have advanced very little upon the Way. I have not yet learnt to be truly human. For it is only through thanksgiving that I can become myself.
Kallistos Ware
Certainly all virtues are very dear to God, but humility pleases Him above all the others, and it seems that He can refuse it nothing.
Francis de Sales
Humility consists in not esteeming ourselves above other men, and in not seeking to be esteemed above them.
Francis de Sales