Top 306 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Scholars

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. Its that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.

The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.

We tend to gravitate towards our tribes; the challenge is to understand the people of other tribes.

The soul’s deepest thirst is for God Himself, who has made us so that we can never be satisfied without Him.

the very notion of blindness about color constitutes an ideological confusion at best, and denial at its very worst.

A saint has to be a misfit. A person who embodies what his culture considers typical or normal cannot be exemplary.

If I have a right to a job, education, health care or a house, then I must be able to specify the person or persons who owe me any or all of these things.

The tears that fall from the eyes of a truthful Believer, out of the fear of the Lord, and, then, roll down his face, however little they are, even of the size of a fly [i.e. just one drop], shall prevent the Fire of Hell from touching his face.

The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think...Throughout the Mahabharata ... Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war.... The Gita is a dishonest book .

God is not a 'being' removed from creation, ruling it from outside in the manner of a patriarchal ruler; God is the source of being that underlies creation and grounds its nature and future potential for continual transformative renewal in biophilic mutuality.

A 'living constitution' is a dead constitution, because it does not do the one and only thing a written constitution is supposed to do: provide parameters around the power of officials.

If Allah created you for this world, He would have created you without death.

All archaeologists in Israel and Palestine make use of the New Testament Gospels. They do this because the Gospels exhibit verisimilitude. In short, the Gospels help archaeologists know where to dig and they help archaeologists understand what they unearth. The 2nd-century Gospels and Gospel-like writings rarely exhibit verisimilitude, so archaeologists rarely appeal to them.

Among the believers who show most perfect faith are those who have best disposition and are kindest to their families.

The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of knowledge not as thing but as a process, not as a noun but as a verb.

One of the most common mistakes people make in any conversation is to think about what they want to say next instead of actually listening to what the other person is saying.

The problem in Burma is the problem in Egypt, the problem you refer to in Yemen, and the problem in a lot of these countries in the world: that you can get stuck in the process of transition, in what’s been called a competitive authoritarian… a pseudo democratic regime.

Once we have a sense of how long a decision should take, we generally should delay the moment of decision until the last possible instant. If we have an hour, we should wait 59 minutes before responding. If we have a year, we should wait 364 days. Even if we have just half a second, we should wait as long as we possibly can ... Life might be a race against time but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires a pause.

God's image…is found not best in individual humans, but in humans as they relate to each other.

Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant, and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth. The problem is that his name is George W. Bush, and he is our president.

When you are able to love someone unconditionally , without reason, you can begin to understand God's unconditional love for you.

The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews.

The Bible is not a book like any other. It makes a claim that God spoke and speaks through its message. It argues that as his creatures, we are accountable to him for what he has revealed. The trustworthiness of Scripture points to its authority as well. Scripture is far more than a history book, as good and trustworthy as that history is. It is a book that calls us to examine our lives and relationship to God. Beyond the fascinating history, it contains vital and life-transforming truths about God and us.

History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.

When grace changes the heart, submission out of fear changes to submission out of love, and true humility is born.

The mainstream media hears what it wants to hear and has its own narratives.

This strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.

The uncommitted life isn't worth living.

The Goal of Science is understanding lawful relations among natural phenomena. Religion is a way of life within a larger framework of meaning.

We must remind our politicians that we expect them to speak honestly and to be concerned about real issues, and not simply with the obtaining or retaining of power.

To Allah we belong and to Him is our return.

Sweating bullets to line up the Bible with our exhausting expectations, to make the Bible something it’s not meant to be, isn’t a pious act of faith, even if it looks that way on the surface. It’s actually thinly masked fear of losing control and certainty, a mirror of an inner disquiet, a warning signal that deep down we do not really trust God at all.

The Angels of (Mercy) do not enter a house in which there are pictures (of animals).

...four in five of us are, to some extent, members of faith communities. If just a fraction of this huge body of believers were to connect their faith to sustainable development and act accordingly, with the support of their institutions, the gains could be world-changing

Apostasy from Islam is a crime and is punishable by death.

Once a sage asked why scholars always flock to the doors of the rich, whilst the rich are not inclined to call at the doors of scholars. ‘The scholars‘ he answered , ‘are well aware of the use of money, but the rich are ignorant of the nobility of science.’

I would rather die going to the west than live by staying in the east.

Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.

One writes to teach, to move or to delight.

Collective Intelligence (CI) is the capacity of human collectives to engage in intellectual cooperation in order to create, innovate, and invent.

Nothing has happened in education until it has happened to a student.

Having observed the forces of all things natural and celestial and having examined by painstaking investigation the sympathy among those things, brings into the open powers hidden and stored away in nature; thus, magic links lower things (as if they were magical enticements) to the gifts of higher things...so that astonishing miracles thereby occur.

There are no speed limits on the road to success.

You are not aware of the consequences that would result (if you were granted what you desire) because what you seek might be to your detriment. (O soul) be conscious that your Master is more aware about your well-being than you are.

Jihad and the rifle alone. NO negotiations, NO conferences and NO dialogue

The protection of private property does more than promote market efficiency; it enhances the level of human freedom in the most intimate and personal parts of our lives.

Radical skepticism is no more critical than is credulity.

True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.

There are two great things that we need to find in life: one is love, probably the most important, and the second is work, and they compete with one another from time to time.

God loves us and seeks our redemption, at times through angels.

In Egypt, a civil state means a modern nationalist state that is compatible with Islamist provisions.

The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behaviour reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.

An unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth.

The idea of going on a spiritual journey is really part of the DNA of India itself.

An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.

Hilary Clinton's great sin was that she left the nicely wallpapered domestic sphere with a slam of the door, took up public life on her own, leaving big feminist footprints all over the place, and without so much as an apology.

Wait for the last possible moment to make a decision.

Martin Luther King's 1963 'I have a dream' speech was a thrilling milestone in the civil rights movement, so enduring that we tend to attribute its searing power to a kind of magic. But Gary Younge's meditative retrospection on its significance reminds us of all the micro-moments of transformation behind the scenes--the thought and preparation, vision and revision--whose currency fed that magnificent lightning bolt in history.

Christianity's goal is not escape from this world. It loves this world and seeks to change it for the better.