Old Churches Quotes

I like the plain, old-fashioned churches, built for use, not show, where people met for hearty praying and preaching, and where everybody made their own music instead of listening to opera singers, as we do now. I don't care if the old churches were bare and cold, and the seats hard, there was real piety in them, and the sincerity of it was felt in the lives of the people. I don't want a religion that I put away with my Sunday clothes, and don't take out till the day comes round again; I want something to see and feel and live by day-by-day, ~ Louisa May Alcott

Not far from our house, and opposite the old church with the golden cross, stood a large building, even larger than the church, and having many towers. ~ Max Muller

The old church tower and garden wall
Are black with autumn rain
And dreary winds foreboding call
The darkness down again ~ Emily Bronte

Tourists as well as natives want to see cultural achievements - whether it's the Banaue Terraces, the old churches or museums. ~ F. Sionil Jose

My visual landscape as a child was the inside of a lot of these old churches. And the Baroque drama of the things was what I was first engaging with artwise. I'm much more attracted to the aesthetic of religious iconography than the actual religious side. The passion and the blood and the violence and the gaudy side of it I find really fascinating. ~ Florence Welch

Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

It is of immense importance for the understanding of the word of God, to read it in course, so that we may read every day a portion of the Old and a portion of the New Testament, going on where we previously left off. ~ George Muller

Rest," he whispers against my temple, and despite my sleepiness, the feel of his lips moving across my skin makes me shiver. "I'll be here when you wake up."
"Oh, God," I mumble, sliding my arm over Eli's chest and snuggling close. "Have we become that old couple that doesn't have sex anymore?"
Eli's chuckle rumbles against my ear. "We had sex this morning."
"Okay," I say already being pulled into slumber. ~ Elle Jasper

Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human. ~ Christopher Hitchens

He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For ~ George Eliot

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down. ~ William Faulkner

They think I'm too old to cause trouble.
Old age is a powerful disguise. ~ Katherine Applegate

Acceptance is a gift that helps you to skip forward and live in the present. Everyone needs a chance to be fulfilled with acceptance which is the impetus to heal old wounds. Sometimes you meet someone and you can skip forward because of the greeting, the acceptance, and the goodbye. Say hello to a stranger. They will greet you with a smile almost every time. ~ Brian Michael Good

Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again? ~ Saidiya V. Hartman

Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray
with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom. ~ Anne Lamott

But the same receptivity to experience that can make life difficult for the highly sensitive also builds their consciences. Aron tells of one sensitive teen who persuaded his mother to feed a homeless person he'd met in the park, and of another eight-year-old who cried ~ Susan Cain

Reporters called down every other profession - medicine, law, politics - for failing to meet a level of professional responsibility which they would allow no one to enforce on themselves, and which they themselves would too rarely enforce on their own. Do as I say, not as I do was something you couldn't say to a six-year-old, but it had become a ready cant for grown-ups. And if it got any worse, then what? ~ Tom Clancy

The Don looked around his cell, including the naked 30 year-old woman sprawled in his bed and steaming bowl of Mussels Marinara sitting in front of him. He was always famished after sex and couldn't envision a life on the outside that would limit all of the things he loved to do. In a way, being on the outside would be like going to jail for Don Vito. ~ Phil Wohl

Probably, the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that led the old one to a crisis.. ~ Thomas Kuhn

Along the Oregon coast an arm of the Pacific shushes softly against rocky shores. Above the waves, dripping silver in the moonlight, old trees, giant trees, few now, thrust their heads among low clouds, the moss thick upon their boles and shadow deep around their roots. In these woods nights are quiet, save for the questing hoot of an owl, the satin stroke of fur against a twig, the tick and rasp of small claws climbing up, clambering down. In these woods, bear is the big boy, the top of the chain, but even he goes quietly and mostly by day. It is a place of mosses and liverworts and ferns, of filmy green that curtains the branches and cushions the soil, a wet place, a still place. ~ Sheri S. Tepper

Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.' 'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals - mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of. ~ George Orwell

Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when-There she blows!-the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again. ~ Herman Melville

No, I mean I'm claiming her for real. Now. I'm done fucking around. Gonna make her my old lady. ~ Joanna Wylde

When a battle is fought, all are anxious to know who are the victors. In these verses we are told who is to gain the victory in life. When I was converted I made this mistake: I thought the battle was already mine, the victory already won, the crown already in my grasp. I thought that old things had passed away, that all things had become new; that my old corrupt nature, the Adam life, was gone. But I found out, after serving Christ for a few months, that conversion was only like enlisting in the army, that there was a battle on hand, and that if I was to get a crown, I had to work for it and fight for it. ~ D.L. Moody

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age. ~ Billy Graham

Our churches are full of people during work hours, morning, noon, evening, praying instead of being in the factories, libraries, laboratories, facilitating economic growth ~ Sunday Adelaja

While at Colonel Niel's marquee I saw a detail of soldiers bring out a man by the name of Rowland, whom they were going to shoot to death with musketry, by order of a court-martial, for desertion. He was being hauled to the place of execution in a wagon, sitting on an old gun box, which was to be his coffin. When they got to the grave, which had been dug the day before, the water had risen in it, and a soldier was baling it out. Rowland spoke up and said, 'Please hand me a drink of that water, as I want to drink out of my own grave so the boys will talk about it when I am dead, and remember Rowland. ~ Sam R. Watkins

The little platoon of the black community is the church. Our Christian faith is based on individual freedom from sin and the personal decision to find spiritual liberty that leads to a better life here on Earth and for eternity. On Sundays in America, the most conservative people can be found in black churches. ~ Allen West

I'm an old trial lawyer. ~ Patrick Leahy

Old age is fifteen years older than I am. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In matters of potential suffering, a single 200,000 years old human being stood against a 550 million years old octopus - acutely aware of its suffering, yet unable to do much to alleviate its misery - is the structural equivalent of comparing the convoluted majesty of the International Space Station to a child's paper and stick kite, and to then stand the octopus against the far more ancient 1.5 billion years old protozoa is to weigh the complexity of the kite to a dust mote caught up in a lazy afternoon breeze. ~ John Zande

I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have reached the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is the years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and the rest of the world have broken down, after all - after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. ~ Jane Smiley

In India they tell a fable about this: There was once a great devotee of Vishnu who prayed night and day to see his God. One night his wish was granted and Vishnu appeared to him. Falling on his knees, the devotee cried out, "I will do anything for you, my Lord, just ask."
"How about a drink of water?" Vishnu replied.
Although surprised by the request, the devotee immediately ran to the river as fast as his legs could carry him. When he got there and knelt to dip up some water, he saw a beautiful woman standing on an island in the middle of the river. The devotee fell madly in love on the spot. He grabbed a boat and rowed over to her. She responded to him, and the two were married. They had children in a house on the island; the devotee grew rich and old plying his trade as a merchant. Many years later, a typhoon came along and devastated the island. The merchant was swept away in the storm. He nearly drowned but regained consciousness on the very spot where he had once begged to see God. His whole life, including his house, wife, and children, seemed never to have happened.
Suddenly he looked over his shoulder, only to see Vishnu standing there in all his radiance.
"Well," Vishnu said, "did you find me a glass of water? ~ Deepak Chopra

I feel most alive when I'm singing along to old gospel music. ~ Judith Hill

What are you?
I opened my eyes gingerly. The flashlight that had blinded me was lying a few feet from my head now, which gave me just enough light to see what appeared to be a twelve-year-old girl sitting on my chest.
I'd gotten my butt handed to me by a sixth grader? That was embarrassing. ~ Rachel Hawkins

O fools, awake! The rites ye sacred hold
Are but a cheat contrived by men of old
Who lusted after wealth and gained their lust
And died in baseness-and their law is dust. ~ Al-Ma'arri

The silence had for me the force of eternal life; for on the plane of eternity without beginning and without end there is no such thing as speech. (p. 19)

It was always my opinion that the best course a man could take in life was to remain silent; that one could not do better than withdraw into solitude like the bittern which spreads its wings beside some lonely lake. (p. 40)

Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that every one possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. (p. 80) ~ Sadegh Hedayat