Religious Books Quotes

Narayan's novels did not prepare me for the distress of India. As a writer he had succeeded almost too well. His comedies were of the sort that requires a restricted social setting with well-defined rules; and he was so direct, his touch so light, that, though he wrote in English of Indian manners, he had succeeded in making those exotic manners quite ordinary. I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. Narayan's novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu. ~ V.S. Naipaul

If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, then error will be. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end. ~ Daniel Webster

I too took the plunge - the vow to observe brahmacharya for life. I must confess that I had not then fully realized the magnitude and immensity of the task I undertook. The difficulties are even today staring me in the face. The importance of the vow is being more and more borne in upon me. Life without brahmacharya appears to me to be insipid and animal-like. The brute by nature knows no self-restraint. Man is man because he is capable of, and only in so far as he exercises, self-restraint. What formerly appeared to me to be extravagant praise of brahmacharya in our religious books seems now, with increasing clearness every day, to be absolutely proper and founded on experience. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Now it is a pleasant pastime, a joy and pleasure, to read the Bible and religious books, tracts, and papers, whereby I can learn more of the beauties of a life of salvation. May God help sinners everywhere to seek him while he may be found. ~ E.E. Byrum

Bookstores, invariably, are a refuge. There's one in the town where they live, and the first time Lydia ventures in, it takes her breath away. She has to steady herself against a shelf. The smell of coffee and paper and ink. It's nothing like her little shop back home. It's stocked mostly with religious books, and instead of calendars and toys, they carry rosaries, Buddha figurines, yarmulkes. Still, the upright spines of the books are bedrock. Steady. There's an international poetry section. Hafiz. Heaney. Neruda. Lydia flips past the twenty love poems and reads "The Song of Despair." She reads it desperately, hungrily, bent over the books in the aisle of the quiet shop. Her fingers ready the next page while she devours the words. The book is water in the desert. ~ Jeanine Cummins

The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Nature is man's religious book, with lessons for every day. ~ Theodore Parker

I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer. ~ Francis W. Newman

America has begun a spiritual reawakening. Faith and hope are being restored. Americans are turning back to God. Church attendance is up. Audiences for religious books and broadcasts are growing. And I do believe that he has begun to heal our blessed land. ~ Ronald Reagan

You live in days when a lingering, Lot-like religion abounds. The stream of profession is far broader than it once was, but far less deep in many places. A certain kind of Christianity is almost fashionable now. To belong to some party in the Church of England, and show a zeal for its interests
to talk about the leading controversies of the day
to buy popular religious books as fast as they come out, and lay them on your table
to attend meetings
to subscribe to Societies
to discuss the merits of preachers
to be enthusiastic and excited about every new form of sensational religion which crops up
all these are now comparatively easy and common attainments. They no longer make a person singular. They require little or no sacrifice. They entail no cross. ~ J.C. Ryle

If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency; if the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will; ~ Daniel Webster

Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate. I ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

A good book is fruitful of other books; it perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its readers. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails ... and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
- Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain ~ Anatole Broyard

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds ~ Niall Williams

The first book that they gave me was Jeannie, a young teenager. I went on with her maybe ten books. ~ Dan DeCarlo

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition - that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable - is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute - the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures - is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

You're a little bit of a show-off. First you get us out of hell. And then you defeat like the biggest, baddest Watcher on the books, and then you go on a high-speed, very high-altitude chase, and then you resuscitate the dead. Are you done? Because seriously, I don't know if I can take any more excitement. ~ Cynthia Hand

No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen ... ~ Terry Pratchett

There was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries. ~ Stephen King

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said. ~ William, Saroyan

Your love and your love of literature, like song, should flow seamlessly in an unbroken rhythm. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

My primary job is to choose the programs, either to co-produce them, or acquire them after they're finished. So, I read a lot of scripts, I meet with producers and I read a lot of books. ~ Rebecca Eaton

When I want to read a novel, I write one. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Blessed be the memory of those few brethren who contended so strenuously for their constitutional rights and religious freedom, against such an overwhelming force of desperadoes! ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

Part of it may be that translators are paid by the word, so the more carefully they work on a translation, the less they are paid for their time, which means that if they are very careful they may not earn much. And often, the more interesting or unusual the book, the more painstaking they have to be. For one or two difficult books, I took so long over each page that I earned less than a dollar an hour. But I'm not sure this explains why so many people do not respect translators or would simply prefer not to think about them. ~ Lydia Davis

Ask God to show you any changes you need to make in your relationships. And make sure your closest relationship continues to be with Jesus Himself. ~ David Jeremiah

Among other things, [books by Bruce Doyle III and Mike Hernacki] explain the importance of the "winning attitude" I have been urged to adopt: a positive attitude "attracts" or "fulfils", depending on which author's weird science you go with, postiive results, with little or no action on your part required. Herein, too, lies the answer to the question I once posed ... : would it be enough just to fake a winning attitude? No way, according to Doyle: ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

In the major institutions of education, government, science, and the arts, we are witnessing the imposition of a post-Christian view of life. It now dominates in motion pictures, television, and every other form of entertainment. ~ D. James Kennedy

Discussions do not lead to definite conclusions. The Srutis are divided in opinion. And there is not a single Rishi whose opinions can be accepted as conclusive. Truth about religious matters is hidden in caves. Therefore that is the proper path which has been followed by great men. ~ Mahabharata

Scroll through a list of books online, and you will find page after page after page of book covers with shirtless guys and titles that scream BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE! or ALPHA-MALE PARANORMAL WEREWOLF ROMANCE! or something equally ridiculous. All these shitty books look like clones of each other. There's not an original thought in sight. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

I was trained from the beginning to work, to save. I have always regarded it a as a religious duty to get all I could honorably and to give all I could. ~ John D. Rockefeller

Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work. ~ Rodney Stark

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts. ~ A.S. Byatt

Fill my mouth with the accuracy and potency of Your word and Spirit that I may make war through prayer with swift precision (Psalm 144:1). ~ Shawntel Jefferson

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000. ~ William Faulkner

And I could read you far easily than I could the books in the library. ~ Avijeet Das

I had a hard time publishing my books in the beginning of my career, because editors were afraid what people would think of THEM, personally, if their name was associated with me. ~ Susie Bright

All of my books now come from readers' ideas. ~ Ann Rule

In his thoughtful and complex style of analysis, Hitler continued on to note the following: "Since the newspapers in question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation ... I regarded them more as the products of anger and envy than the [representation] of a principled, though perhaps mistaken, point of view." In the lines above, we see Hitler begin to wrestle with anti- Semitism, flatly reject religious anti-Semitism as unworthy of Austrian cultural tradition, and suspect that the arguments of the anti-Semitic press and gutter pamphlets were exaggerated beyond credibility by too much subjective and too little objective and principled argument. The view of virtually every Hitler biographer that he based his anti-Semitism on arguments derived from the gutter press and pamphlets of Vienna does not hold up in the face of the words above. To the contrary, we see Hitler take the measure of that literature.

--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, pp. 103-104 ~ Russel H.S. Stolfi