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)