Top 1200 Orthodox Church Quotes & Sayings

Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.

The Orthodox hierarchy doesn't have the kind of power that high-ranking clergy do in other churches. There isn't even a worldwide governing board to hold all the various Orthodox bodies together.

We have to separate here the church in its broad sense. We have Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox churches. The Catholic church is a corporation like a chief executive. A fairly homogenous operation. Today its attitude toward anti-Semitism is much more severe than it's ever been. The Catholic Church today is much less the problem than the other groups.

My parents were Orthodox Jews but not very regular Orthodox Jews. I was bar mitzvahed and all that. But God was hardly ever mentioned in my family. Franklin D. Roosevelt was.

We were Orthodox Jews, but we really didn't deserve it. I mean, bacon - my father said, 'Don't put bacon in the house,' but we had bacon. We didn't keep kosher. And we observed which today would be Conservative Jews. But in those days, we belonged to an Orthodox temple. So we made out we were Orthodox Jews, but we really weren't.

You know what I do on Sundays? I sing in a choir. I sing in a Greek Orthodox choir, and I'm the only hillbilly tenor in the Orthodox Church.

[Pope Francis] did something that both his two predecessors had failed to do - John Paul II and Benedict. Francis met with the Russian patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

The way that Russian Orthodox services work generally, and certainly the way that this worked, is that it goes on for hours and hours, and people wander in and wander out, and people talk the whole way through. One of the American women said to the other, "This is so beautiful. I can actually imagine maybe even becoming Orthodox." She went on and on, and finally a Russian seated just in front of her turned and said, "You are not member of church because it is beautiful; you are member of church because it is the single truth of God!"

What's really neat about the Orthodox church is that it's like walking back in time 2,000 years to the time of the Apostles, when they created these services. You walk into that and it's really like... living it. They have maintained the truth ever since the beginning.

I want you to know he's coming to the church before he comes FOR the church. He's gonna perfect the Church so the church can be the Image, and be him, and be his representation.

Church is what you do. Church is who you are. Church is the human outworking of the person of Jesus Christ. Let's not go to Church, let's be the Church.

Even Martin Luther and John Calvin believed that the Roman Catholic church, up to the Council of Trent, was basically orthodox - a true church with sound fundamental doctrines as well as significant error.

I grew up with my grandmother because my parents were making careers and didn't have much time for me. She was a highly religious Serbian Orthodox, spending most of her time in church. It's a great mix, and I use all these elements in my work.

There are only five notes in the musical scale, but their variations are so many that they cannot all be heard. There are only five basic colors, but their variations are so many that they cannot all be seen. There are only five basic flavors, but their variations are so many that they cannot all be tasted. There are only two kinds of charge in battle, the unorthodox surprise attack and the orthodox direct attack, but variations of the unorthodox and the orthodox are endless. The unorthodox and the orthodox give rise to each other, like a beginningless circle-who could exhaust them?

An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government.

Easter celebrations are evidence of the increased benign influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional churches in our country on society.

The church is in trouble-that's what they say anyways. The problem is most of what they call the church is not the church, and the church is not quite as in trouble as everybody thinks. As a matter of fact, the church today is absolutely beautiful-she's glorious, she's humble, she's broken, and she's confessing her sin. The problem is what everybody's calling the church today isn't the church. Basically, by and large, what's called the church today is nothing more than a bunch of unconverted church people with unconverted pastors.

Has God no living church? He has a church, but it is the church militant, not the church triumphant. We are sorry that there are defective members, that there are tares amid the wheat. . . . Although there are evils existing in the church, and will be until the end of the world, the church in these last days is to be the light of the world that is polluted and demoralized by sin. The church, enfeebled and defective, needing to be reproved, warned, and counseled, is the only object upon earth upon which Christ bestows His supreme regard.

The Church is holy, although there are sinners within her. Those who sin, but who cleanse themselves with true repentance, do not keep the Church from being holy. But unrepentant sinners are cut off, whether visibly by Church authority, or invisible by the judgement of God, from the body of the Church. And so in this regard the Church remains holy.

If you go to church, and like the singing better than the preaching, that's not orthodox.

The biggest cause of society's change today is that people no longer believe in orthodox religion. They go to church, but they no longer believe in God.

As you know, the separation of church and state is not subject to discussion or alteration. Under our Constitution no church or religion can be supported by the U.S. Government. We maintain freedom of religion so that an American can either worship in the church of his choice or choose to go to no church at all.

I really do feel that these people are brothers and sisters in God's family. I am looking to build bridges with the Orthodox Church, looking to build bridges with the Catholic Church, with the Anglican church.

A horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire 20th century. The Church is just rising from its knees. Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution.

The Reformed Church was identified with the old all-white government of South Africa and its apartheid policy. The Roman Catholic Church was closely identified with the Franco and Salazar dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. . . . More recently, . . . the Serbian Orthodox Church has come to be identified with the policies of Serbia (Yugoslavia).

The short-term impact is that people are encouraged to give the Church another look. It's up to the liveliest parts of the Church - the dynamically orthodox parts of the Church - to seize that opportunity.

We have gone a long way toward civilization and religious tolerance, and we have a good example in this country. Here the many Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church do not seek to destroy one another in physical violence just because they do not interpret every verse of the Bible in exactly the same way. Here we now have the freedom of all religions, and I hope that never again will we have a repetition of religious bigotry, as we have had in certain periods of our own history. There is no room for that kind of foolishness here.

I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.

I basically look like a lot of modern Orthodox people you know, but I work on a TV show where I sometimes have to kiss Jim Parsons. That's why I don't take on the title of modern Orthodox, but in terms of ideology and theology I pretty much sound like a liberal modern Orthodox person.

Has God no living church? He has a church, but it is the church militant, not the church triumphant. We are sorry that there are defective members. . . . While the Lord brings into the church those who are truly converted, Satan at the same time brings persons who are not converted into its fellowship. While Christ is sowing the good seed, Satan is sowing the tares. There are two opposing influences continually exerted on the members of the church. One influence is working for the purification of the church, and the other for the corrupting of the people of God.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

More thinking is required, and we should all exercise our God-given right to think and be unafraid to express our opinions, with proper respect for those to whom we talk and proper acknowledgment of our own shortcomings. We must preserve freedom of the mind in the church and resist all efforts to suppress it. The church is not so much concerned with whether the thoughts of its members are orthodox or heterodox as it is that they shall have thoughts.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of Israeli Jews are not Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox hold the keys not just to Israel's Jewish sacred places, but to the life cycle events - conversions, weddings, divorces, burials - of the country's more than six million Jews.

It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be suggested to criticism.... It does not follow that, because a position is orthodox, it is wrong.

Orthodox Islam, like orthodox interpretations of the other Abrahamic faiths, views homosexuality as sinful and usually defines marriage as only ever a heterosexual union. This isn't to say that there is no debate on the subject.

The church persecuted is the church pure, and the church pure is the church powerful. I believe that Americans by and large have been cursed with blessings, and perhaps before long we'll be blessed with cursings. However, the assaults against the church will be turned around, and everything that the enemy meant for harm will ultimately be used for good.

When I walk into an Orthodox Church... one is immediately aware that one has stepped into the presence of what St. Paul would call the whole family in heaven and earth. You have stepped into the precincts of heaven!

I'd been to Saint Petersburg before, but there's been a change in people's minds. Maybe it's a fashionable thing, but people have returned to the churches. I went to a Russian Orthodox and a Catholic church - both of the queues, enormous!

The Westboro Baptist Church is no more a church than Church's Fried Chicken is a church.

Christ is our hope, our cleansing and santification, our resurrection, life and repose. He alone is what we all need, and therefore, the Orthodox Church constantaly pronounces these words aloud so that we may hear them during Holy Services of the Church, and be constantly renewed. For we are inclined to forget the only thing we need. With death all will be taken from us, all earthly goods, riches, beauty of body and raiment, spacious dwellings, etc., but the virtue of the soul, that incorruptible raiment, shall remain with us eternally.

The brother of my grandfather was the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and revered as a saint. So everything in my childhood is about total sacrifice, whether to religion or to communism. This is what is engraved on me. This is why I have this insane willpower. My body is now beginning to be falling apart, but I will do it to the end. I don't care. With me it is about whatever it takes.

I'm a New Testament Christian. I reject and throw out titles. I'm not a fundamentalist, though I'm fundamental in all of my doctrine. I'm not an evangelical, because that means that I exclude the Catholics and main-liners, and Orthodox. I'm a believer who loves Jesus and I work with everybody else whatever their denomination; Catholic, Orthodox, charismatic, main line, evangelicals, anyone who loves Jesus.

It takes more than a busy church, a friendly church, or even an evangelical church to impact a community for Christ. It must be a church ablaze, led by leaders who are ablaze for God.

The one thing that the Catholic Church desires, and that I seek as Bishop of Rome, “the Church which presides in charity”, is communion with the Orthodox Churches.

[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church.

The Church has little idea how unorthodox it is at any given moment. If a church can't yet be perfectly orthodox, it can, with the Holy Spirit's help and by the grace of God, be perpetually reformable.

I grew up an Orthodox Jew, and now I'm not an Orthodox Jew. So I have sympathy for people who lose their faith.

The fundamental differences between Marxian and traditional orthodox economics are, first, that the orthodox economists accept the capitalist system as part of the eternal order of Nature, while Marx regards it as a passing phase in the transition from the feudal economy of the past to the socialist economy of the future.

Lots of Orthodox go to church every Sunday but don't know much about the faith. Yet they know that there is something that they don't know much about.

Clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God.

When I see ultra-Orthodox Jews stamping all over Jaffa, or when I see them deciding who is a Jew, I think: 'What's happened to the grand dream of Zionism?' I don't like to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. What's wrong with Manchester?

Towards orthodox religion, father's own attitude remained one of tolerance. He looked upon the New Testament as the noble story of a human being which, because of ignorance and the lack of printing presses, had become exaggerated. He maintained that religions served their purpose; some people depended on them all their lives to make them honest. Others did not need to be so held in line. But subjection to any church was a reflection on strength and character. You should be able to get from yourself what you had to go go church for.

My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.

The idea that America has some distinctive role to play in the unfolding of God's plan is compatible with orthodox Christianity. But it should be tempered by recognizing that America is not the church.

We have the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church talking about how gay marriage is a sign of the apocalypse, or Russian TV talking about how meteorites are coming to punish Russians for homosexuality.

[Sviatoslav] Schevchuk, in the dogmatic part declares himself to be a son of the Church and in communion with the bishop of Rome and the Church. He speaks of the Pope and his closeness of the Pope and of himself, his faith, and also of the Orthodox people there. The dogmatic part, there's no difficulty. He's Orthodox in the good sense of the word, that is in Catholic doctrine, no.

Give any orthodox church the power, and to-day they would punish heresy with whip, and chain, and fire. As long as a church deems a certain belief essential to salvation, just so long it will kill and burn if it has the power.

Orthodox theologians insisted that the rest of humankind were only transitory creatures, lost in sin - a view that would support what would become their dominant teaching about salvation, offered only through Christ, and, in particular, through the church they claimed to represent.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study.

The gloomy theology of the orthodox--the Calvinists--I do not, I cannot believe. Many of the notions--nay, most of the notions--which orthodox people have of the divinity of the Bible, I disbelieve. I am so nearly infidel in all my views, that too, in spite of my wishes, that none but the most liberal doctrines can command my assent.