Sacrilege Quotes

One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It's one or the other. One doesn't love God and sacrilege impartially. Except when one doesn't know that sacrilege has been committed. Because one doesn't know God. ~ Ayn Rand

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. ~ Carl Jung

Murdering anything is just plain criminal, but a Southerner murdering a magnolia? Well, that's an unforgivable sacrilege against nautre and the South. ~ Beth Hoffman

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.
(unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions) ~ William Gaddis

She's coming here? I knew she was on her way to New Orleans, but I thought we'd have the service at a funeral home. Betts slung the dishrag over her shoulder. This was why her mother hadn't wanted help planning the service - Gigi's final farewell was to be the ultimate fuck-you. It was wrong. It was a sacrilege. ~ Katie Graykowski

Martin was alphabetizing my bookshelves. They used to kill men for sacrilege like that. ~ Jim Butcher

If love is the most sacred bond between two people, then betrayal must be the ultimate sacrilege. ~ Marty Rubin

There'd be no forgiveness this time. It was one thing to destroy a person, but to destroy their work was a sacrilege Aster couldn't easily forget. All that was left of a person's life was recorded on paper, in annals, in almanacs, in the physical items they produced. To end that was to end their history, their present, their future. ~ Rivers Solomon

It was the ultimate sacrilege that Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was rejected and even put to death. And it continues. In many parts of the world today we see a growing rejection of the Son of God. His divinity is questioned. His gospel is deemed irrelevant. In day-to-day life, His teachings are ignored. Those who legitimately speak in His name find little respect in secular society.

If we ignore the Lord and His servants, we may just as well be atheists - the end result is practically the same. It is what Mormon described as typical after extended periods of peace and prosperity: "Then is the time that they do harden their hearts, and do forget the Lord their God, and do trample under their feet the Holy One" (Helaman 12:2). And so we should ask ourselves, do we reverence the Holy One and those He has sent?

Some years before he was called as an Apostle himself, Elder Robert D. Hales recounted an experience that demonstrated his father's sense of that holy calling. Elder Hales said:

"Some years ago Father, then over eighty years of age, was expecting a visit from a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on a snowy winter day. Father, an artist, had painted a picture of the home of the Apostle. Rather than have the painting delivered to him, this sweet Apostle wanted to go personally to pick the painting up and thank my father for it. Knowing that Father would be concerned that everything was in readiness for the forthcoming visit, I ~ D. Todd Christofferson

I do it for the girls."

"What girls?"

He smirked. "They think it's sexy."

"It's not."

"No?"

"I assure you."

"Not sexy?"

"You look khila, like a half-wit."

"That hurts," he said.

"What girls anyway?"

"You're jealous."

"I'm indifferently curious."

"You can't be both." He took another drag and squinted through the smoke. "I'll bet they're talking about us now."

In Laila's head, Mammy's voice rang out. Like a mynah bird in your hands. Slacken your grip and away it flies. Guilt bore its teeth into her. Then Laila shut off Mammy's voice. Instead, she savored the way Tariq had said us. How thrilling, how conspiratorial, it sounded coming from him. And how reassuring to hear him say it like that - casually, naturally. Us. It acknowledged their connection, crystallized it.

"And what are they saying?"

"That we're canoeing down the River of Sin," he said.

"Eating a slice of Impiety Cake."

"Riding the Rickshaw of Wickedness?" Laila chimed in.

"Making Sacrilege Qurma."

They both laughed. Then Tariq remarked that her hair was getting longer. "It's nice," he said.

Laila hoped she wasn't blushing. "You changed the subject."

"From what?"

"The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy."

"You know."

"Know what?"

"That I only ~ Khaled Hosseini

I was ... attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love. ~ Igor Stravinsky

ROM2.21 Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? ROM2.22 Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege? ROM2.23 Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? ~ Anonymous

To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege. ~ Leo Tolstoy

We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument ... Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege. ~ C.S. Lewis

Hit ain't sacrilege. Miss Effie Belle says when she cain't think what to have for dinner, she asts God and right off He gives her an idea. To my thinkin', thet's sacrilege."
Miss Love really laughed. "There's not a woman in the world who hasn't prayed what to cook for dinner, Rucker! ~ Olive Ann Burns

Strange star-like object over Oslo right before Obama arrives. A gift of a golden medal given by a group of wise men ... Nah. ~ Craig Ferguson

What am I? A scholar? No, hardly that; a lover of woodlands, a solitary, in the habit of uttering disjointed words in the shadow of beech trees, and used to scribbling presumptuously under an immature laurel tree; fervent in toil, but not happy with the results; a lover of letters, but not fully versed in them; an adherent of no sect, but very eager for truth; and because that is hard to find, and because I am a clumsy searcher, often, out of self-distrust, I flee error and fall into doubt, which I hold in lieu of truth. Thus I have finally joined that humble band that knows nothing, holds nothing as certain, doubts everything - outside of the things that it is sacrilege to doubt. ~ Francesco Petrarca

In their pursuit of "making disciples of every nation" and baptizing all those within the empire, they stumbled into baptizing the empire itself, thus turning sacrament into sacrilege[ ... ] ~ Shane Claiborne

Where is your brother, he asked, and cain responded with another question. Am I my brother's keeper, You killed him, Yes, I did, but you are the one who is really to blame, I would have given my life for him if you had not destroyed mine, It was a question of putting you to the test, But why put to the test the very thing you yourself created, Because I am the sovereign lord of all things, And of all beings you will say, but not of me and my freedom, What, the freedom to kill, Just as you had the freedom to stop me killing abel, which was perfectly within your capabilities, all you had to do, just for a moment, was to abandon that pride in your infallibility that you share with all the other gods, and, again just for a moment, to be truly merciful and accept my offering with humility, because you shouldn't have refused it, you gods, you and all the others, have a duty to those you claim to have created, This is seditious talk, Yes, possibly, but I can guarantee you that if I were god, I would repeat every day Blessed are those who choose sedition because theirs is the kingdom of the earth, That's sacrilege, Maybe, but no more sacrilegious than you allowing abel to die… ~ Jose Saramago

Well, that's a very interesting question," he said - to which he had no interesting or even sane answer. He simply conceded that if the Messiah came back and reconvened the Sanhedrin, well, then, yes - though mere mortals like ourselves might not see the wisdom of it - homosexuals, adulteresses, witches, and Sabbath breakers would be killed, and every other barbaric prescription found in the Old Testament would apply. As I was contemplating where on his person I should aim my vomit, he managed this final defense of his religion: "You just don't understand what an obscenity - what a sacrilege - these things would represent in the presence of the Messiah ~ Sam Harris

I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn't I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn't fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots.
The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. "Hey," I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn't he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn't he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic.
"Oh, hello," I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn't I have any respect for myself?
I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. "What're you doing in there?" I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans.
"Hiding," I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist.
"Well, c'mere," he said softly.
My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON ~ Ree Drummond

In some of the early northern European paintings, Christ looks like you flushed him out from under a bridge, but in Sunday-school books and the sorts of pictures they sell at Christian supply stores, he falls somewhere between Kenny Loggins and Jared Leto, always doe-eyed and, of course, white, with brown - not black - hair, usually wavy. And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which - face it - was practically designed to make a man's stomach and shoulders look good.

What would happen, I often wonder, if someone sculpted a morbidly obese Jesus with titties and acne scars, and hair on his back? On top of that, he should be short - five foot two at most. "Sacrilege!" people would shout. But why? Doing good deeds doesn't make you good-looking. ~ David Sedaris

Nat Parson says it's the devil's mark."
"Nat Parson's a gobshite."
Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson 'gobshite. ~ Joanne Harris

I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever - that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was a miracle of evil. It was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed, and so we kept it safely guarded until the time we could bring it out, and show it to others, and say, 'Behold. This is the worst thing man can do'. ~ Irene Gut Opdyke

Any philosophy is a sacrilege against creation. It just gives people the kinds of explanations that they want to hear. ~ Sadghuru

People learn to shop for churches; there is no loyalty to the church. They're consumers being attracted to one product or another. I think it's sacrilege, to tell you the truth, it really is. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

We have legalized confiscation, consecrated sacrilege, and condoned high treason. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Sacrilege is acceptable only as a game. ~ Julien Torma

No one must use the name of God to commit violence. To kill in the name of God is a grave sacrilege. To discriminate in the name of God is inhuman. ~ Pope Francis

In the most rigorous [Roman] laws, a wife was condemned to support a gamester, a drunkard, or a libertine, unless he were guilty of homicide, poison, or sacrilege, in which cases the marriage, as it should seem, might have been dissolved by the hand of the executioner. ~ Edward Gibbon

You entered,
Abrupt like "Take it!",
Mauling suede gloves, you tarried,
And said:
"You know,-
I'm soon getting married."

Get married then.
It's all right,
I can handle it.
You see - I'm calm, of course!
Like the pulse
Of a corpse.

Remember?
You used to say:
"Jack London,
Money,
Love and ardour,"--
I saw one thing only:
You were La Gioconda,
Which had to be stolen!

And someone stole you.

Again in love, I shall start gambling,
With fire illuminating the arch of my eyebrows.
And why not?
Sometimes, the homeless ramblers
Will seek to find shelter in a burnt down house!

You're mocking me?
"You've fewer emeralds of madness
than a beggar kopecks, there's no disproving this!"
But remember
Pompeii came to end thus
When somebody teased Vesuvius!

Hey!
Gentlemen!
You care for
Sacrilege,
Crime
And war.
But have you seen
The frightening terror
Of my face
When
It's
Perfectly calm?

And I feel-
"I"
Is too small to fit me.
Someone inside me is getting smothered. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Some people thought I was using my popularity as a singer to sell my first novel. For others, it was almost a sacrilege: a practitioner of a minor art daring to enter the field of high art. ~ Chico Buarque

For many potential Bible readers, this expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. You're not holy enough to read the Holy Bible. It might even be sacrilege for you to try. If the Bible is God's perfect infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. That is, our sinful nature as fallen creatures is what separates us from God, and therefore from God's Word. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you "what it really says." I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature. ~ Timothy Beal

During my first few months of Facebooking, I discovered that my page had fostered a collective nostalgia for specific cultural icons. These started, unsurprisingly, within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. They commonly included a pointy-eared Vulcan from a certain groundbreaking 1960s television show.

Just as often, though, I found myself sharing images of a diminutive, ancient, green and disarmingly wise Jedi Master who speaks in flip-side down English. Or, if feeling more sinister, I'd post pictures of his black-cloaked, dark-sided, heavy-breathing nemesis. As an aside, I initially received from Star Trek fans considerable "push-back," or at least many raised Spock brows, when I began sharing images of Yoda and Darth Vader. To the purists, this bordered on sacrilege.. But as I like to remind fans, I was the only actor to work within both franchises, having also voiced the part of Lok Durd from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

It was the virality of these early posts, shared by thousands of fans without any prodding from me, that got me thinking. Why do we love Spock, Yoda and Darth Vader so much? And what is it about characters like these that causes fans to click "like" and "share" so readily?

One thing was clear: Cultural icons help people define who they are today because they shaped who they were as children. We all "like" Yoda because we all loved The Empire Strikes Back, probably watched it many times, and can reci ~ George Takei

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship. ~ Marquis De Sade

The Church wishes, for example, to apply Rosmini's invitation to 'hear loftily of God' with worthy liturgical celebrations, stripping the concept of God from the guises, at times ingenuous and caricatural, in which an agrarian and prescientific civilization had dressed it. But it is a hard job. On the right, they shout impiety and sacrilege every time an old ritual is abandoned for a new one. On the left, vice versa, novelty is indiscriminately hailed for the sake of novelty, the whole edifice of the past is merrily dismantled, paintings and statues are sent up to the attic; idolatry and superstition are found everywhere, and it is even said that, to safeguard God's dignity, God must be spoken of in only the most select terms, or there must actually be silence. ~ Pope John Paul I

Now, if I could get Mark to put down his phone and stop taking breaks, we'd be able to finish up before Oprah comes on." – Bubba
"Bubba, what are you going to do when they cancel her show?" – Caleb
"Shut your mouth, boy. That's sacrilege in this store. You talk like that, and I'll toss you through the window like an old-timey hobo in a Western." – Bubba ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

He's probably seen that horrible Johnny Depp version of the movie. That you kids like it and not the original Gene Wilder version is sacrilege." "Mom, ~ Paul Tremblay

At times on quiet waters one does not speak aloud but only in whispers, for then all noise is sacrilege. ~ Sigurd F. Olson

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during 'God save the King'. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so 'enlightened' that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. ~ George Orwell

Sacrilege is often defined as taking something that belongs to God and using it profanely. But there is a bigger sacrilege we commit all the time. That is to take something and give it to God when it means absolutely nothing to us. ~ Ravi Zacharias

A number of terrible things about falling in love make it not worth the time and the effort. But the worst of these is that we can never truly fall in love with a person, but only what we think that person is - more precisely, we fall in love with an image of a person that we create in our minds based on a few inconsequential traits: hair color; bloodline; timbre of voice; preference in music or literature. We are so quick to make a judgment on first sight, and it is so easy for us to decide that the object of our love is unquestionably perfect. And while people can only be human at best, these same fallible humans are more than capable of imagining each other to be infallible gods.
Any relationship we have with another human being is an ongoing process of error correction, altering this image that we see in our mind's eye whenever we lay love-blinded eyes on our beloved. It changes bit by bit until it matches the beloved herself, who is invariably less than perfect, often unworthy of love, and often incapable of giving love. This is why any extended interpersonal relationship other than the most superficial, be it a friendship, a romance, or a tie between father and daughter, must by necessity involve disappointment and pain. When the woman you worship behaves as a human being eventually will, she does not merely disappoint; she commits sacrilege, as if the God we worship were to somehow damn Himself. ~ Dexter Palmer

When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy. ~ Ben Hecht

Let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity" - objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": - in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.


Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed and mariage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,
And cloisterd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.


Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
'Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee. ~ John Donne

The rice bowl is to me the most valid reason in the world for doing anything. A piece of one's soul to the multitudes in return for rice and wine does not seem to me a sacrilege. ~ Han Suyin

Dear Habicht, / Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble ... / What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul ... ? ~ Albert Einstein

There is nothing more serious than the sacrilege of schism because there is no just cause for severing the unity of the Church. ~ Saint Augustine

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety! ~ Frances Wright

I know I can be accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of a novel about love or pirates. But I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists and historians who write in code. ~ Eduardo Galeano

To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege. ~ Emil M. Cioran

In that most burdensome moment of all human history, with blood appearing at every pore and an anguished cry upon His lips, Christ sought Him whom He had always sought - His Father. "Abba," He cried, "Papa," or from the lips of a younger child, "Daddy."
This is such a personal moment it almost seems a sacrilege to cite it. A Son in unrelieved pain, a Father His only true source of strength, both of them staying the course, making it through the night - together. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish. ~ Anne Lamott

It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too. (4) ~ Michael Greenberg

Speak, Madame; speak, queen," said Buckingham. "The softness of your voice covers the hardness of your words. You speak of sacrilege, but the sacrilege is in the separation of hearts that God has formed for each other! ~ Alexandre Dumas

Witchcraft cannot come in any colour other than a deep green, a resistance to this despoilment, this sacrilege. [...] Animism cannot disengage from the struggle of life, shamanism cannot disengage from the struggle of life, neither can a living witchcraft. No-one else is going to do this for us. We are the Witchcraft and we must stand for our land, and with those who fight for their own. ~ Peter Grey

Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connexion; and why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. ~ Mary Shelley

Each instrument has something to say to you. It's got its own character. Each horn has its own character and will say to you certain things. If you violate that, it's almost a sacrilege! ~ Jerome Richardson

Without a word, we start to walk together down the long hall. I'm so pent up and irritated with this place; I want to kick down the closed doors and break up a prayer circle, maybe juggle the athame with a couple of candles just to see the horrified looks on their faces and hear their screams of "Sacrilege! ~ Kendare Blake