Quotes about clergyman (36 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“As soon as it is completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

On the Wardenclyffe Tower, in "The Future of the Wireless Art" in Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony (1908)

Music , Business , Distant , Appearance

“An artist needn't be a clergyman or a church warden, but he must have a warm heart for his fellow men”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Men , Heart

“The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of _____; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected.”

Anthony Trollope book The Warden

Source: The Warden (1855), Ch. 1, first lines

Question , Personality

“The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 1, p. 8

Study , Science

“God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—
I’m going, all along.”

Emily Dickinson Some keep the Sabbath going to Church

324: Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

God

“"Coming events cast their shadows before" quoted the clergyman…”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Source: Dashpers http://www.dashper.net.nz/dashpers.htm (unfinished, unpublished novel), Chapter Two - A House is built

Quotes

“Abélard would find most of his old problems sensitive to his touch today. Time has settled few or none of the essential points of dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly than the Church ever did, to decide once for all whether Unity or Diversity is ultimate law; whether order or chaos is the governing rule of the Universe, if Universe there is; whether anything except phenomena exists. Even in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak too loud. Why, and for what, and to whom, is man a responsible agent? Every jury and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and clergyman has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every nation may have a different system. One court may hang, and another may acquit for the same crime, on the same day; and Science only repeats what the Church said to Abélard, that where we know so little, we had better hold our tongues.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Law , Problem , Universe , Science

“Quite absurd, because Caleb has absolutely no taste for fornication. He never has had. So lucky, being a clergyman.”

Agatha Christie book The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger (1942)

“You know what I want. If I may become a clergyman, if I fulfill that position so that my work is equal to that of our Father [who was a clergy-man], then I shall thank God. I have good hope that I shall succeed, it was once said to me by someone who was further on in life than I, and who was no stranger in Jerusalem:… I believe that you are a Christian, you see, it was so good for me to hear those words… It is good to believe that there is a God who knows what we need, better than we know it ourselves, and who helps us when we need help. It is also good to believe that, just as in the olden days, now, too, an angel is not far from those who feel godly sorrow… I've carefully read the story of Elijah so often, and so often has it given me strength up to now:”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Vincent then quotes 1 Kings 19:3-15, leaving out all but the beginning of verses 14 and 15
quote from his letter to Theo, from Amsterdam, 31 May 1877 letter 118 http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let118/letter.html
1870s

Life , God , Hope , Angels

“One person I do feel a little sorry for, though, is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important clergyman in Britain and he's only got two lousy palaces to live in. What sort of life is that for a man of God? I bet if Jesus came back, even he'd be embarrassed for him; I bet he wouldn't be able to look him in the eye.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Religion in the UK" (17 April 2007) http://youtube.com/watch?v=uOYje1oJt7Q
2007

Life , God , Feeling , Personality

“I tell you, brother, I am not good from a clergyman's point of view. I know full well that, frankly speaking, prostitutes are bad, but I feel something human in them which makes me feel not the least scruple to associate with them; I see nothing very wrong in them... And now, as in other periods of decline of civilization, the corruption of society has turned upside down all relations of good and evil, and one falls back logically on the old saying: "The first shall be last and the last shall be first."”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Drenthe, The Netherlands, Sept. 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 326) p. 38
Vincent is referring to his former relation with Sien, in The Hague
1880s, 1883

Feeling , Evil

“He had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

The Dagger with Wings (1926)

People

“In the progress of the work he founded a Collegium Biblieum, or Bible club, consisting of his colleagues Melanchthon, Bugenhagen (Pommer), Cruciger, Justus Jonas, and Aurogallus. They met once a week in his house, several hours before supper. Deacon Georg Rörer (Rorarius), the first clergyman ordained by Luther, and his proof-reader, was also present; occasionally foreign scholars were admitted; and Jewish rabbis were freely consulted. Each member of the company contributed to the work from his special knowledge and preparation. Melanchthon brought with him the Greek Bible, Cruciger the Hebrew and Chaldee, Bugenhagen the Vulgate, others the old commentators; Luther had always with him the Latin and the German versions besides the Hebrew. Sometimes they scarcely mastered three lines of the Book of Job in four days, and hunted two, three, and four weeks for a single word. No record exists of the discussions of this remarkable company, but Mathesius says that "wonderfully beautiful and instructive speeches were made."
At last the whole Bible, including the Apocrypha as "books not equal to the Holy Scriptures, yet useful and good to read," was completed in 1534, and printed with numerous woodcuts.
In the mean time the New Testament had appeared in sixteen or seventeen editions, and in over fifty reprints.
Luther complained of the many errors in these irresponsible editions.
He never ceased to amend his translation. Besides correcting errors, he improved the uncouth and confused orthography, fixed the inflections, purged the vocabulary of obscure and ignoble words, and made the whole more symmetrical and melodious.
He prepared five original editions, or recensions, of his whole Bible, the last in 1545, a year before his death.
The edition of 1546 was prepared by his friend Rörer, and contains a large number of alterations, which he traced to Luther himself. Some of them are real improvements, e. g., Die Liebe höret nimmer auf, for, Die Liebe wird nicht müde (1 Cor. 13:8). The charge that he made the changes in the interest of Philippism (Melanchthonianism), seems to be unfounded.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's Bible club

Death , Books , Beauty , Error

“One great reason why clergymen’s households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home or close about the house.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 24

Home , Housing

“There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.”

Henry Fielding book Amelia

Book IX, Ch. 10
Amelia (1751)

Universe , Animals

“There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

Drawing , Personality

“May God give me the wisdom which I need and grant me what I so fervently desire, that is, to finish my studies as quickly as possible and he ordained, so that I can perform the practical duties of a clergyman.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In a letter to Theo, from Amsterdam, 19 Nov. 1877; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 113), p. 18
as student, in Amsterdam, staying in the house of his uncle
1870s

Wisdom , God , Study

“A man who is convinced of the truth of his religion is indeed never tolerant. At the least, he is to feel pity for the adherent of another religion but usually it does not stop there. The faithful adherent of a religion will try first of all to convince those that believe in another religion and usually he goes on to hatred if he is not successful. However, hatred then leads to persecution when the might of the majority is behind it.
In the case of a Christian clergyman, the tragic-comical is found in this: that the Christian religion demands love from the faithful, even love for the enemy. This demand, because it is indeed superhuman, he is unable to fulfill. Thus intolerance and hatred ring through the oily words of the clergyman. The love, which on the Christian side is the basis for the conciliatory attempt towards Judaism is the same as the love of a child for a cake. That means that it contains the hope that the object of the love will be eaten up…”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Rabbi Solomon Goldman of Chicago's Anshe Emet Congregation, p. 51
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein's God (1997)

Love , Truth , Faith , Religion

“There are certain great sentiments which simultaneously possess many minds and make what we call the spirit of the age. That spirit at the close of the last century was peculiarly humane. From the great Spanish Cardinal Ximenes, who refused the proposal of the Bishop Las Casas to enslave the Indians; from Milton, who sang, 'But man over man He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free', from John Selden, who said, 'Before all, Liberty', from Algernon Sidney, who died for it, from Morgan Godwyn, a clergyman of the Established Church, and Richard Baxter, the Dissenter, with his great contemporary, George Fox, whose protest has been faithfully maintained by the Quakers; from Southern, Montesquieu, Hutcheson, Savage, Shenstone, Sterne, Warburton, Voltaire, Rosseau, down to Cowper and Clarkson in 1783 — by the mouths of all these and innumerable others Religion, Scepticism, Literature, and Wit had persistently protested against the sin of slavery. As early as 1705 Lord Holt had declared there was no such thing as a slave by the law of England. At the close of the century, four years before our Declaration, Lord Mansfield, though yearning to please the planters, was yet compelled to utter the reluctant 'Amen' to the words of his predecessor. Shall we believe Lord Mansfield, who lived in the time and spoke for it, when he declared that wherever English law extended — and it extended to these colonies — there was no man whatsoever so poor and outcast but had rights sacred as the king's; or shall we believe a judge eighty-four years afterwards, who says that at that time Africans were regarded as people 'who had no rights which the white man was bound to respect?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

I am not a lawyer, but, for the sake of the liberty of my countrymen, I trust the law of the Supreme Court of the United States is better than its knowledge of history.
1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

People , Age , Religion , Law

“Lewis Carroll is somebody who wore different hats. He was a clergyman, a mathematician, a teacher. He wrote serious books, and amazing children's books. He was a photographer. So like most people, he was many people in one skin. Creatively, he made a greater impact than almost any other Victorian, and yet we know next to nothing about him, we just fall back on the old cliché.”

Gyles Brandreth (1948) British writer, broadcaster and former Member of Parliament

Interview The Scotsman, 2010

Children , People , Books , Teachers

“"The chief fault in English economists at the beginning of the [nineteenth] century was… that they did not see how liable to change are the habits and institutions of industry." Thus Marshall in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge, referring to Ricardo (Marshall 1885, p. 155). In the circumstances of that occasion, the remark may have been intended in some part as an olive branch, because the only other serious contender for the Chair had been the High Tory economic historian William Cunningham, Archdeacon of Ely, famous as an anti-theoretical institutionalist and famous also as a polemicist - he was the clergyman who once told his congregation that for him the bliss of Heaven would be incomplete if it lacked the pleasures of controversy.”

R. C. O. Matthews (1927–2010) British economist

Source: "The Economics of Institutions and the Sources of Growth." 1986, p. 903

Pleasure , Change , Parting

“To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.”

H.L. Mencken book Treatise on the Gods

Treatise on the Gods (1930; 2nd Edition 1946)
1930s

Life , Disease , Penalty , Sex

“Never, ever ask a former clergyman to say the blessing over a holiday dinner. Not if you like your dinner warm, anyway.”

Mary Kay Andrews (1954) American writer(original name/Kathy Hogan Trocheck)

Blue Christmas (2006).

Holiday

“Winter Light — suppose we discuss that now?… The film is closely connected with a particular piece of music: Stravinski's A Psalm Symphony. I heard it on the radio one morning during Easter, and it struck me I'd like to make a film about a solitary church on the plains of Uppland. Someone goes into the church, locks himself in, goes up to the altar, and says: 'God, I'm staying here until in one way or another You've proved to me You exist. This is going to be the end either of You or of me!' Originally the film was to have been about the days and nights lived through by this solitary person in the locked church, getting hungrier and hungrier, thirstier and thirstier, more and more expectant, more and more filled with his own experiences, his visions, his dreams, mixing up dream and reality, while he's involved in this strange, shadowy wrestling match with God.
We were staying out on Toro, in the Stockholm archipelago. It was the first summer I'd had the sea all around me. I wandered about on the shore and went indoors and wrote, and went out again. The drama turned into something else; into something altogether tangible, something perfectly real, elementary and self-evident.
The film is based on something I'd actually experienced. Something a clergyman up in Dalarna told me: the story of the suicide, the fisherman Persson. One day the clergyman had tried to talk to him; the next, Persson had hanged himself. For the clergyman it was a personal catastrophe.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Jonas Sima interview 
Bergman on Bergman (1970)

God , Dreams , Music , Way

“Just as the human population was starting its unprecedented growth spurt in the late eighteenth century, this was published. It's a first edition of an essay on population by the English clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus made a very simple observation about the relationship between humans and resources and used it to look into the future. He pointed out that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man." Food production can't increase as rapidly as human reproduction. Demand will eventually outstrip supply. Malthus goes on to say, if we don't control human reproduction voluntarily, life could end in misery, which earned him a reputation as a bit of a pessimist. But Malthus' principle remains true. The productive capacity or the Earth has physical limits and those limits will ultimately determine how many human beings it can support. m10s58-m12s18”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Life , Food , Support , Future

“Praying as a public function, particularly when led by a clergyman, is a vulgar display of an exclusively personal matter.”

Joseph Lewis (1889–1968) American activist

Ingersoll the Magnificent (Memorial Dedication Address, August 11, 1954)

Personality

“A clergyman who engages in business, and who rises from poverty to wealth, and from obscurity to a high position, avoid as you would the plague.”
Negotiatorem clericum, et ex inope divitem, ex ignobili gloriosum quasi quandam pestem fuge.

Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church

Letter 52 http://books.google.com/books?id=1GZRAAAAcAAJ&q=%22negotiatorem+clericum%22+%22inope+divitem+ex%22+gloriosum+%22quandam+pestem+fuge%22&pg=PA248#v=onepage
Letters

Business , Wealth

“…my father's desire was, that I should become a clergyman: not, indeed, that thus I might serve God, but that I might have a comfortable living”

George Müller (1805–1898) German-English clergyman

A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller Written by Himself, First Part.
First Part of Narrative

God

“That clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt who being often asked out to dinner never refuses to go.”
Facile contemnitur clericus, qui saepe vocatus ad prandium, ire non recusat.

Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church

Letter 52
Letters

“I was incredibly excited. Because my father was a clergyman we never got our presents on Christmas Eve, like other Swedish children do. We got them on Christmas Day… Well, you can imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be my older brother — he's four years older than myself — who got the projector — and I was given a teddy bear. It was one of my life's bitterest disappointments. After all, my brother wasn't a scrap interested in cinematography. But both of us had masses of lead soldiers. So on Boxing Day I bought the projector off him for half my army and he beat me hollow in every war ever afterwars. But I'd got the projector, anyway.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Stig Bjorkman interview 
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: In our family we had a well-to-do aunt who always gave us magnificent Christmas presents. She was so much part of the family that we even included her in our prayers at bedtime... I suppose I must have been nine or ten years old at the time. Suddenly Aunt Anna's Christmas presents were lying there too, and among them a parcel with 'Forsner's on it. So of course I instantly knew it contained a projector. For a couple of years I'd been consumed with a passionate longing to own one, but had been considered too small for such a present... I was incredibly excited. Because my father was a clergyman we never got our presents on Christmas Eve, like other Swedish children do. We got them on Christmas Day... Well, you can imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be my older brother — he's four years older than myself — who got the projector — and I was given a teddy bear. It was one of my life's bitterest disappointments. After all, my brother wasn't a scrap interested in cinematography. But both of us had masses of lead soldiers. So on Boxing Day I bought the projector off him for half my army and he beat me hollow in every war ever afterwars. But I'd got the projector, anyway.

Life , War , Children , Disappointment

“Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Anthony Trollope, Lecture (1870)

Time , People , Women , Education

“I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16th. But I assure you I am not.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother-tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.
Letter to Mr. Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent (1815-12-11) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Drawing , Thinking

“[T]o require that a so-called layman should not use his own reason in religious matters, particularly since religion is to be appreciated as moral, but instead follow the appointed clergyman and thus someone else's reason, is an unjust demand because as to morals every man must account for all his doings. The clergyman will not and even cannot assume such a responsibility.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996), pages 94-95
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Religion

“I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work.” By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be “chosen.”

John Ruskin book Unto This Last

The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.

Essay I: "The Roots of Honour," section 29
Unto This Last (1860)

Sense

“The doctor begins where the apothecary ends, and the clergyman where the doctor ends.”

Mateo Alemán book Guzmán de Alfarache

Pt. II, Lib. III, Ch. V.
Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604)

“As a retired clergyman, I'm still a priest. I have much more freedom than I had, but I haven't had much more free time.”

John George Vlazny (1937) Catholic archbishop

Source: What does an archbishop do when he retires? https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-cardinal-george-retirement-plan-met-20141125-story.html (25 November 2014)

Time , Freedom