Bible Quotes

...A dialogue between Bible-lovers, Bible-haters, and everyone in-

between...

I am a creature of a day. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to

God. I want to know one thing: the way to heaven. God himself has
condescended to teach me the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh,
give me that book! At any price give me the book of God. Let me be a man
of one book.--John Wesley

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always
convinced that it says what he means. --George Bernard Shaw

It is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to

open one. - William Sloane Coffin

The Holy Book of the living God suffers more from its exponents today than
from its opponents. -Leonard Ravenhill

It will greatly help you to understand scripture if you note – no only what is
spoken and written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what
time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what
goes before and what follows. --Miles Coverdale, in his introduction to his
Bible translation.

When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It
is talking to me, and about me." --Soren Kierkegaard

Never place a period where God has placed a comma. God is still
speaking. Gracie Allen

We do not read the Bible the way it is; we read it the way we are. --Evelyn
Uyemura

Bible reading is an education in itself. --Lord Tennyson

Reading the Bible without meditating on it is like trying to eat without

swallowing. --Anonymous

The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any
book that ever existed. --Thomas Paine
It is not at all incredible, that a book which has been so long in the
possession of mankind should contain many truths as yet undiscovered. --
Bishop Butler

It is clear that there must be difficulties for us in a revelation such as the

Bible. If someone were to hand me a book that was as simple to me as the
multiplication table, and say, 'This is the Word of God. In it He has revealed
His whole will and wisdom,' I would shake my head and say, 'I cannot
believe it; that is too easy to be a perfect revelation of infinite wisdom.'
There must be, in any complete revelation of God's mind and will and
character and being, things hard for the beginner to understand; and the
wisest and best of us are but beginners. --R.A. Torrey

The letter of Scripture is a veil just as much as it is a revelation; hiding

while it reveals, and yet revealing while it hides.—Andrew Jukes

Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a

landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested
spiders have spun their webs. --Henry Ward Beecher

There is a way of reading the Bible that seems to leave God far away, off in
the shadows somewhere. It is all information and technicalities and
knowledge, but it feels like you're sitting with your back towards God. You
come up against a difficulty or question, and you go to books, you ask
pastors, friends, strangers on the internet, anyone but Him. Gradually God
gets smaller and dimmer. --Unknown

Some people like to read so many [Bible] chapters every day. I would not
dissuade them from the practice, but I would rather lay my soul asoak in
half a dozen verses all day than rinse my hand in several chapters. Oh, to
be bathed in a text of Scripture, and to let it be sucked up in your very soul,
till it saturates your heart! --Charles Haddon Spurgeon

In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced

with "Thus saith the Lord". It is... not merely a sacred book but a book so
remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite -- it excludes
or repels -- the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only
by a tour de force... It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it
will not continue to give literary delight very long, except to those who go to
it for something quite different. I predict that it will in the future be read, as it
always has been read, almost exclusively by Christians. --C.S. Lewis

We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted

opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the
Church and the world.…It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is
hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has
moulded us. –J.I. Packer

The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest
route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite
passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can
make a whole Christian. --AW. Tozer

The Bible is a harp with a thousand strings. Play on one to the exclusion of
its relationship to the others, and you will develop discord. Play on all of
them, keeping them in their places in the divine scale, and you will hear
heavenly music all the time. --William P. White

For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year. If you
picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have
shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was
and what it meant. --Martin Luther

Here, then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to
study God's Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so
much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is
not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are
lazy. --R. C. Sproul

One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it,
and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed. --Leonard Ravenhill

The scripture in times of disputes is like an open town in times of war,

which serves in differently the occasions of both parties. --Alexander Pope

Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has
overlooked what it wished to overlook. -- Ludwig von Mises

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which
makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that. --Mccosh

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not

understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. --
Mark Twain

The Bible is the greatest example of the whole being greater that its parts.
–Michael Phillips.

Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer. --
Napolean
The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed. --Patrick
Henry

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in

ever greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as
it desires, beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it
shines forth in the gospels, it will not go.—Goethe

Who decides what is right and wrong in the world? Who has the authority to
define morality for all of creation? It is not the courts, congress, the media,
public opinion, the "politically correct" police, the "tolerance" brigade or
even the church. The only answer has been, is and always will be Jesus
Christ. You can find His opinion on a great variety of subjects in His best
seller... The Bible. --Jeffrey E. Ramey

You may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God, and give it to
the devil, if you do not desire to live according to it. -- Martin Luther

The word of God hidden in the heart is a stubborn voice to suppress.--Billy

Graham

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. --
George Washington

I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this Book that you
can by reason and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better
man. It is the best Book which God has given to man. --Abraham Lincoln

I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make
better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands. --Thomas Jefferson.

So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to
read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful
citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I have for
many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year. --
John Quincy Adams

If there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the credit is due to

my parents for instilling in me an early love of the Scriptures. --Daniel
Webster

Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the
fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and
daily made me learn a part of it by heart. --John Ruskin
I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless
they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the
hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do
not reign paramount. --Martin Luther

If you believe that exposing your children to violence is a problem, by all

means keep them away from the Bible. --Rev. Charles Henderson

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with
blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the
world. --Henry L. Mencken

The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be
known in the world. --Charles Dickens

The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from
the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all
men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-
distant, long-forgotten home. --Thomas Carlyle

Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and still man's obligations to God
would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp
and guide would be gone; the same voyage to make, but his chart and
compass would be overboard! --Henry Ward Beecher

The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit
which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a
crime against humanity. --Immanuel Kant

The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and oppressed. The
human race is not in a position to dispense with it. --Thomas Huxley

It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The

principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom. -- Horace
Greeley

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the
land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them
we had the Bible and they had the land. --Bishop Desmond Tutu

We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook,

an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are
overloaded. --Charles Kingsley
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the
way of women's emancipation. --Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Bible itself is intolerant, and true followers of God's word should be as
well.-- Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University

Too often we see the Bible through whatever lens we get from our culture.
--Brian McLaren

He who perverts Scripture is not the man who reduces this sacred poetry to
its true meaning. Nay, that man perverts the Bible who hardens into
dogmas the glowing metaphors of Eastern poetry. --Thomas Allin

Any number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or
that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word
about whales or apples. In the former case it refers to a fish, which might
imply any sort of sea-monster; and in the second, to the essential
experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of the tree, which is obviously
more general and even more mystical . . . The things that look silly now are
the first rationalistic explanations rather than the first religious or primitive
outlines. If those original images had been left in their own natural mystery
of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep, nobody would have quarrelled
with them half so much . . . But it is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible
because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are
read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible.--G. K.
Chesterton

Just because the Bible says something doesn’t make it truth if what you are
saying from the Bible is slanted, distorted, mis-applied, or merely the letter
of the word. --J. Preston Eby

One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its
secrets to the irreverent and the censorious. --James I. Packer

The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has stood so much bad
preaching. --A.T. Robertson

The devil can quote Scriptures and so can his ministers and they can quote
them in perfect King James English. –Gary Amirault

We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other
reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but
beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through
that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the
Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh
with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck
dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and
adorations. ... --C. S. Lewis

Spouting scripture has no magic to dispel the devil. Scripture has

phenomenal power but unless you submit your mind to its inerrant truth, its
power is largely lost to you. --Martha Kilpatrick

The one thing the New Testament forbids us to do is to treat it as a static

document to be used as a set of proof-texts for instant solutions to complex
and controversial contemporary problems. To misuse the New Testament
in this way is to deny its dynamic character and to fail to realize that the
Word has to be applied in a specific context. ...A static interpretation of the
New Testament is dependent on a frozen Christology.--Karl Paul Donfried

The Christian community continues to exist because the conclusions of the

critical study of the Bible are largely withheld from them. --Hans
Conzelmann

The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman
who reads it. --Robert Ingersoll

Both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white.--
William Blake

When you are reading a book in a dark room, and come to a difficult part,
you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bibles to Christ. --
Robert Murray M'Cheyne

The Bible rose to the place it now occupies because it deserved to rise to
that place, and not because God sent anybody with a box of tricks to prove
its divine authority. --Bruce Barton

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane
history.-- Sir Isaac Newton

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. --Samuel Butler

More than 400 errors in the first edition of the King James Bible were
corrected in a subsequent edition two years later. --Neil Lightfoot, How We
Got the Bible pg. 59

That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no

proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not. --Thomas Paine
We are all literalists, we are all doubters. It just depends on which part of
the Bible we happen to be focusing our attention. –Michael Phillips

The Bible is no mere book, but a Living Creature, with a power that
conquers all that oppose it. --Napoleon

The observant man recognizes many mysteries into which he can not
pretend to see, and he remembers that the world is too wide for the eye of
one man. But the modern sophists are sure of everything, especially if it
contradicts the Bible. --Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The Bible is a collection of fantastic legends without scientific

support.-- The Communist Dictionary issued by the Soviet State Publishing

I am going to put the Bible out of business. --Robert Ingersoll

Another century and there will not be a Bible on earth! --Voltaire

Voltaire expected that within fifty years of his lifetime there would not be
one Bible in the world. His house is now a distribution center for Bibles in
many languages. --Corrie Ten Boom

Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books, we would

admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all its
absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude,
barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it
contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the
source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and
anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature's
night. These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so
palpably absurd, that every free, unbiased soul is forced to raise the
standard of revolt. –Robert Ingersoll

The Catholics have a Pope. Protestants laugh at them, and yet the Pope is
capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the Pope is mortal,
and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever. The
Protestants have a book for their Pope. The book cannot advance. Year
after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever.
--Robert Ingersoll

The foibles, inconsistencies and humanness (of the Bible) all the more
show us that the letter of the Scripture is not to be enthroned as an idol to
be worshipped of itself. The letter will always kill. It is the spirit which God
has breathed into his holy instrument, the spirit of his high Logos, this
Word, that transmits its life to all those who obey it. –Michael Phillips
The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its
imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it
in another way—to find the Word in it…to re-live, while we read, the whole
Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the
very contentions between the Word and the human material through which
it works. –C.S. Lewis

Instead of believing therefore that because the Scripture is human and has
grown with men, and has marks of our weakness and death and shame
upon it, therefore it must perish and see corruption, I believe that it can
never perish or see corruption. I see it is human; I see that it has grown; I
see it can be judged and wounded. I believe too that it has in its
composition exactly so much of perishableness as Christ’s flesh had when
He walked here with His apostles. But it is like Christ’s body, the peculiar
tabernacle of God’s truth. And those who walk by it day and night know
this, for they have seen, as all shall one day see, it transfigured. –Andrew
Jukes

The Bible reveals God’s adaptability, as it were, to take the human drama
and bring to life from it a flawed document, with its mistakes and lost
endings and errant genealogies, and then raise that document and elevate
it to His use by imbuing it with spiritual power that transcends the level of
humanity altogether. –Michael Phillips

There is an old Italian proverb about the nature of translation: “Traddutore,

traditore!” This means simply, “Translators—traitors!” Of course, as you can
see, something is lost in the translation of this pithy expression: there is
great similarity in both the spelling and the pronunciation of the original
saying, but these get diluted once they are put in English dress. Even the
translation of this proverb illustrates its truth! -- Dr. Daniel Wallace, “The
History of the English Bible”

We do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation
of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession,...containeth the
word of God, nay, is the word of God: as the King’s speech which he
uttered in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and
Latin, is still the King’s speech, though it not be interpreted by every
translator with the like grace nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so
expressly for sense, everywhere.--From the translators to the readers in the
introduction to the original 1611 King James Bible.

He who reads the Bible in translation is like a man who kisses his bride
through a veil. --Hayyim Nachman Bialik.
Still, when a veil there must be, the translator’s task is to make it as
gossamer-fine a veil as may be. Indeed, the face of even the most beautiful
of women may be enhanced by a veil, if only the veil be worthy of her
beauty. --MacGregor, Literary History of the Bible

Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated. --C.S.
Lewis

There are no Bibles which do not contain errors. But don't let that scare
you. You see, if our Father would have provided a perfectly written English
translation for you, you probably would spend even less time in prayer and
communion and study than you do now.—Gary Amirault

To preach the Bible as 'the handbook for life,' or as the answer to every
question, rather than as the revelation of Christ, is to turn the Bible into an
entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached Scripture, as
we can see clearly from the questions they asked Jesus. For the
Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia for life's dilemmas. --
Michael Horton

We must stop using the Bible as though it were a potpourri of inerrant

proof-texts by which we can bring people into bondage to our religious
traditions...We must no longer use the Bible as the Pharisees used the
Torah when they gave it absolute and final status. Christian biblicism is no
different from Jewish legalism. It is the old way of the letter, not the new
way of the Spirit. --Robert D. Brinsmead

One of the dangers from which the Church should pray to be delivered is
idolatry of the letter of Scripture. The letter exists for the spirit, not the spirit
for the letter. Literalism is the grave in which spiritual religion is buried. The
New Testament is a book which is to be spiritually interpreted. --James M.
Campbell

If we move in the direction of biblial absolutism ("the religion of the Book"),

how can we escape turning the New Testament into a Christian Torah and
the gospel into a new law? Once we do that, religious fascism with all its
sectarian ugliness cannot be far away. Far better a mistaken Christian (a
heretic) who has somehow caught the Spirit of Christ, than an orthodox
Protestant who thinks that the Spirit is mediated to him through the letter of
correct theology. --Robert D. Brinsmead

We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a "paper
pope." The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience
the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of
the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of
witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or
oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in
relation to the Word of God and God Himself. --Jacques Ellul

The Bible in itself is not the Word of God. The Word of God is a person
(John 1:1). Neither does the Bible have life, power or light in itself any more
than did the Jewish Torach. These attributes may be ascribed to the Bible
only by virtue of its relationship to Him who is Word, Life, Power and Light.
Life is not in the book, as the Pharisees supposed, but only in the Man of
the book (John 5:39). --Robert Brinsmead

The Bible is a wonderful book. It is the truth about the Truth. It is not the
Truth. A sermon taken from the Bible can be a wonderful thing to hear. It is
the truth about the truth about the truth. But it is not the truth. There have
been many books written about the things contained in the Bible. I have
written some myself. They can be quite wonderful to read. They are the
truth about the truth about truth about the Truth. But they are NOT the
Truth. Only Jesus Christ is the Truth. Sometimes the Truth can be drowned
in a multitude of words. --Richard Wurmbrand

The New Testament authors did not customarily refer to their written record
as the Word of God. That subsequent Christian tradition tends to do this
while the writers themselves hesitate to do it should tell us something.
Evidently they distinguished the difference between the living, infinite Word
and the written record more clearly than we do. If the written record is every
called the Word, it is the Word only in a secondary, derivative or relational
sense. It is not the Word in the absolute sense. Strictly speaking, the
Scripture is the witness to the Word of God, and like a good witness, it
does not speak of itself but points away from itself. --Robert D. Brinsmead

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error,
contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not
removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every
passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of
God. –C.S Lewis

Perhaps a way of illustrating the purpose of the law would be to liken the
law to the chaff of grain or the shell of a nut. Christ is the True Meat which
was to come at an appointed time in history. The Mosaic law protected,
preserved, the central message of a redeemer of mankind who would come
in the fullness of time. Chaff or shells act as preservers until the seed inside
is ready to be eaten or until planting time. When it is time to eat the seed in
the nut, we break off the shell! It has served its purpose. –Gary Amirault
The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined
and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of
God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. 'The words
that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' The life is in the
speaking words. God's word in the Bible can have power only because it
corresponds to God's Word in the universe. It is the present Voice which
makes the written word powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber
within the covers of a book. --A. W. Tozer

If you don't live by a Voice you will fashion a god in your own image. You
will take His Word and dissect it, to make it speak what you want it to say.--
John Enslow

Shift from your mind conquering the Bible, down into surrender to the Spirit
of God who will whisper to you what He meant by what He wrote. --Martha
Kilpatrick

The whole meaning of spiritual understanding is that we see what the Spirit
has always meant. It is one of our laws of interpretation that the whole Bible
is focused in Christ, and that the work of the Holy Spirit in every
dispensation relates to Christ. --T. Austin-Sparks

Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New
Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus
spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that
the great manifestation of God is made. --Phillips Brooks

The Word of God is a Person. When you read it, do you see words or do
you see Him? --Jacquelyn K. Heasley

To understand the Book in real perception, it's necessary to know the

Author before you read His Book. To truly KNOW Jesus as He is, we
MUST know Him in experience. --Martha Kilpatrick

Knowing the Word of God does not necessarily mean that we know the
God of the Word. --Chip Brogden

What we really need, after all, is not to defend the Bible but to understand
it. --Millar Burrows

The longer you read the Bible, the more you will like it; it will grow sweeter
and sweeter; and the more you get into the spirit of it, the more you will get
into the spirit of Christ. --Romaine
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate
and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they
may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of
the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.-- A. W. Tozer

One way the God-Man reveals Himself to us, of all ways, is not in a
glorious vision or supernatural event, but in the pages of this thing we call
the Bible. Imagine that. How odd. A book. Why not just appear to the one
who seeks Him and speak face to face. No! Why? It would kill us. It would
absolutely blow us away to be confronted with the Real Jesus, because the
Jesus we have come to believe in is a fairy tale, a jolly elf, a fantasy
character. The Bible prepares us for Him, does it not? Using types,
shadows, stories, just to whet your appetite and get you accustomed to
Him and His dealings so you are not totally shocked when you do meet
Him. --Chip Brogden

The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world just because it tells
me the story of Jesus.-- George MacDonald

The Bible "A Book Worth More than all the other Books that were ever
printed" (Patrick Henry)