Christian And Buddhist Quotes

Pain does not differentiate between rich and poor or Christian and Buddhist. It brings the same feelings to everyone. ~ Debasish Mridha

Even if three centuries of outsider status and intermittent persecution had tested the endurance of individuals and communities, coping with the patronage of a newly Christian emperor posed a challenge. The challenge was all the more threatening for its moral complexity. Was it right for the churches to accept the Emperor's favour, knowing full well that if they did so, they also tacitly accepted his right, so evident in all other aspects of life in the Roman Empire, to call the shots? ~ Kate Cooper

The English Puritans who migrated to Plymouth, Boston, New Haven, and other North American sites did so in order to continue the efforts to purify self, church, and society that were being frustrated in the mother country. Of many striking features of the Puritans, one of the most remarkable was their zeal in developing a Christian mind.45 ~ Mark A. Noll

Without approval and without scorn, but carefully studying the sentences word by word, one should trace them in the Discourses and verify them by the Discipline. If they are neither traceable in the Discourses nor verifiable by the Discipline, one must conclude thus: 'Certainly, this is not the Blessed One's utterance; this has been misunderstood by that bhikkhu - or by that community, or by those elders, or by that elder.' In that way, bhikkhus, you should reject it. ~ Gautama Buddha

Because we worship our way into sin, ultimately we need to worship our way out. When Christians commit sin, they do not cease worshiping. Rather, their worship is directed away from the Creator and toward created things. Repentance is the act of turning from sin and returning to God by trusting in Jesus Christ who is the perfect worshiper. ~ Mark Driscoll

There ought to be such an atmosphere in every Christian church that a man going there and sitting two hours should take the contagion of heaven, and carry home a fire to kindle the altar whence he came. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Finding who you are means losing yourself, and letting the Creator put you back together! ~ Mary Kate

We must follow the ways of the Lord, and take heed to our own ways, lest they lead us into sin. One can take heed if one is not hasty in speaking. The law says: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God' (Dt. 6:4). It said not: 'Speak,' but 'Hear.' Eve fell because she said to the man what she had not heard from the Lord her God. The first word from God says to you: Hear! ~ Ambrose

Discipleship and spiritual formation are less about erecting an edifice of knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively understands the world in light of the Gospel. ~ James K.A. Smith

I am blessed and highly favoured. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If a man going down into a river, swollen and swiftly flowing, is carried away by the current - how can he help others across? ~ Gautama Buddha

No doubt a man may be saved, like the penitent thief, without having received the Lord's Supper. It is not a matter of absolute and indispensable necessity, like repentance, faith, and conversion. But it is impossible to say that any professing Christian is in a safe, healthy, or satisfactory condition of soul, who habitually refuses to obey Christ and attend the Lord's Table. ~ J.C. Ryle

The furnace of affliction is a good place for you, Christian; it benefits you; it helps you to become more like Christ, and it is fitting you for heaven. ~ Charles Spurgeon

You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking,I am not confessing Christ. (Martin Luther) ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Moreover, seeing ourselves as a majority led at times to both a theological downgrade and a counter-productive public stance. The application of the promises to Israel to the United States of America, for example, caused many to miss, as we will see in the next chapter, the meaning of the kingdom of God, and thus to bypass Jesus Christ himself. The idea of America as a Christian nation is able to get "Amens" in the churches only as long as the churches believe America is, at least in some ways, with us and not against us. But what happens when the cultural climate starts to shift in obvious ways? If the church believes the United States is a sort of new Israel, then we become frantic when we see ourselves "losing America." We then start to speak in gloomy terms of America as, at best, Babylon, a place of hopeless exile, or, at worst, Gomorrah, slouching toward the judgment of God. ~ Russell D. Moore

There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ's sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be trust as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be. It is always on His "blood and righteousness" alone that we can rest. ~ Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

Do not say, 'But it is hypocritical to thank God with my tongue when I don't feel thankful in my heart.' There is such a thing as hypocritical thanksgiving. Its aim is to conceal ingratitude and get the praise of men. That is not your aim. Your aim in loosing your tongue with words of gratitude is that God would be merciful and fill your words with the emotion of true gratitude. You are not seeking the praise of men; you are seeing the mercy of God. You are not hiding the hardness of ingratitude, but hoping for the in-breaking of the Spirit.

Thanksgiving with the Mouth Stirs Up Thankfulness in the Heart

Moreover, we should probably ask the despairing saint, 'Do you know your heart so well that you are sure the words of thanks have no trace of gratitude in them?' I, for one, distrust my own assessment of my motives. I doubt that I know my good ones well enough to see all the traces of contamination. And I doubt that I know my bad ones well enough to see the traces of grace. Therefore, it is not folly for a Christian to assume that there is a residue of gratitude in his heart when he speaks and sings of God's goodness even though he feels little or nothing. To this should be added that experience shows that doing the right thing, in the way I have described, is often the way toward being in the right frame. Hence Baxter gives this wise counsel to the oppressed Christian:

'Resolve to spend most of your time in thanksgiving and praising God. If y ~ John Piper

God has given us the gift of faith that we can take what's unseen and make it part of who we are. ~ David Jeremiah

Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy ... He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I'm helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are "near enemies" to every great virtue - reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can't possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a "pathological empathy" of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can't help but stay present ~ Krista Tippett

I hadn't realized until this week that in [Moses'] youth he killed a man, an Egyptian, and buried him under some sandI used to worry that I wasn't enough like Jesus, but yesterday I remembered who was my king; a man who, when God addressed him and told him to lead the people out of Egypt, said, 'But I'm not a good talker! Couldn't you ask my brother instead?' So it should not be so hard to come at this life with a bit of honesty. I don't need to be great like the leader of the Christian people. I can be a bumbling, murderous coward like the King of the Jews. ~ Sheila Heti

As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body. ~ Jim Al-Khalili

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual. ~ George Will

The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian's time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history shows "the"Christian religion as having had two ages of grand thought movements - 0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.61 But these are two springtimes of two Cultures, and in them are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical philosophy - there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and - as the historians forget to add - to end the Christian theology also by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished - just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when Chosroes Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak. ~ Oswald Spengler

Just a few thousand Hezbollah fighters set two countries on fire all by themselves. Don't discount what bloody mayhem and hell a few thousand armed Druze, Christians, and Sunni can do if they decide to go hunting Shia in revenge for destroying their country. ~ Michael Totten

In The Bloudy Tenent, Williams points out that Constantine "did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes." at least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that's when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the state. Williams explains that under Constantine, "the gardens of Christ's churches turned into the wildernesss of national religion, and the world (under Constantine's dominion) to the most unchristian Christendom." Legalizing, legitimizing the Church turned Christianity into just another branch of government enforced by "the sword of civil power," i.e., through state-sponsored violence. ~ Sarah Vowell

I urge our people everywhere, with all of the persuasiveness of which I am capable, to live worthy to hold a temple recommend, to secure one and regard it as a precious asset, and to make a greater effort to go to the House of the Lord and partake of the spirit and the blessings to be had therein. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Everyone will say I'm insane, but I don't care, Rose. Is it insane to marry the girl I love? A girl with golden brown hair, with gifts of beauty and goodness and storytelling? ~ Melanie Dickerson

Everything you go through as a Christian is a training exercise behind which God has a divine purpose. He did not save you so that you could cruise into paradise on a luxury liner; He saved
you to prepare you to be of use in His kingdom. The moment you were born again, He enrolled you in His school of suffering. And every affliction, every trial, is another lesson in the curriculum. ~ David Wilkerson

Epic: A Journey Through Church History fills an urgent need for adult Catholics to recover their history as a believing community, debunk false criticisms of their Church, and understand the Christian underpinnings of the modern world. This is a vivid, thorough and engaging program. I heartily recommend it. ~ Charles J. Chaput

Do you call yourselves Christians? Does then the religion of Him whom you call your Savior inspire your spirit, and guide your practices? Surely not. It is recorded of him that a bruised reed he never broke. Cease, then, to call yourselves Christians, lest you declare to the world your hypocrisy. Cease, too, to call other nations savage, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty than they. ~ Joseph Brant

If the Truth is already clear, what is the use of meditation?' " " 'And if the Truth is hidden?' " Toranaga said. " 'It's already clear,' " Hiro-matsu answered correctly. The quotation was from the ancient Tantric Buddhist teacher, Saraha. ~ James Clavell

Harry saw his death as if it was someone else's. He watched himself from outside his body and he wasn't
scared at all ... he found that he could slide between the spaces in the air itself.
Ecstasy touched him. He was stroked by something that felt like trees, cool, green and leafy. It occurred to him that he died, and he got scared. He felt walls like membranes which shivered with pain and a sound, a terrible sound which promised meaningless tortures, like the Christian stories of his youth. He
recognized the world of pleasure and the world of pain. Bliss, punishment,
heaven and hell. ~ Peter Carey

Worship seals all prayers at the front and at the back. Always pray with praise beginning and praise ending. ~ David Jeremiah