Top 183 Reformation Quotes & Sayings

The Reformation did not directly touch the question of the true character of God's church.

The Reformation was immensely important for all of Danish culture.

If our hearts and minds are not properly transformed, we are like musicians playing untuned instruments, or engineers working with broken and ill-programmed computers. The attunement of the heart is essential to the outflow of grace...We must aim at building the structures of God's kingdom but recognized that we will only create these through the transformation of our experience. Concentration on reformation without revival leads to skins without wine; concentration on revival without reformation soon loses the wine for want of skins.

And finally, it was Deuteronomy that brought about the historical result of Josiah's reformation.

I'd like to write a history, maybe of the Reformation.

Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.

If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it’s now. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?

I'm looking for a second reformation. The first reformation of the church 500 years ago was about beliefs. This one is going to be about behavior. The first one was about creeds. This one is going to be about deeds. It is not going to be about what does the church believe, but about what is the church doing.

About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes".

God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.

But 'tis the talent of our English nation, Still to be plotting some new reformation.

The processes of secularization that followed in the wake of the Reformation continue to work themselves out in complicated ways, not only in Europe but also in North America. To make a very long and complex story short, the success of the Reformation combined with the persistence and renewal of Roman Catholicism in the 16th and 17th centuries made Christianity into an enduring, disruptive problem in new ways, layered on top of problems that already affected late medieval Christianity.

You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.

Trial by jury is part of that bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners (morality).

Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.

The hour of reformation is always delayed; every delay gives vice another opportunity of fortifying itself by habit.

What lasting progress was ever made in social reformation, except when every step was insured by appeals to the understanding and the will?

It's now time to organize and move forward. It's time for deep thinking, reformation of the Democratic Party.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.

No repentance, obedience, self-denial, prayers, tears, reformation or ordinances, without the new creation, avail any thing to the salvation of thy soul.

Get masters of families to do their duty, and they will not only spare you a great deal of labor, but will much further the success of your labors. You are not like to see any general reformation, till you procure family reformation. Some little religion there may be, here and there; but while it is confined to single persons, and is not promoted in families, it will not prosper, nor promise much future increase.

I must begin by telling you that I do not like to preach on Reformation Sunday. Actually, I have to put it more strongly than that. I do not like Reformation Sunday, period.

What distinguishes the arid ages from the period of the Reformation, when nations were moved as they had not been since Paul preached in Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome, is the latter's fullness of knowledge of God's Word. To echo an early Reformation thought, when the ploughman and the garage attendant know the Bible as well as the theologian does, and know it better than some contemporary theologians, then the desired awakening shall have already occurred.

You are not likely to see any general reformation, till you procure family reformation.

People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.

The Gospel is not reformation, decoration or renovation. It is liberation.

Every reformation ruins somebody.

Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils.

A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.

My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior - before the Reformation.

Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.

For ethical fashion, I really like Reformation. It's so fashionable - no hemp trousers.

The Reformation was cradled in the printing-press, and established by no other instrument.

Thinking that morality is all about commandments is a relatively new way of thinking, since the Reformation.

A disaffected America can be drawn into a civilized - but disruptive - dialogue about political change and reformation.

I've learned that even the word 'jubilee' used in connection with the Reformation can give rise to discussions.

My official field was Tudor-Stuart England; I also considered myself reasonably competent when it came to Renaissance and Reformation Europe.

REPENTANCE, n. The faithful attendant and follower of Punishment. It is usually manifest in a degree of reformation that is not inconsistent with continuity of sin.

The true Church preaches REGENERATION; not reformation, not education, not legislation, but regeneration.

It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.

How can we still speak of the salvation and reformation of Europe, when we have to ask Europe's destroyer for help?

Many are friends to the success of reformation, not to reformation.

The argument that there was a social pathology of the English Reformation, that there were fundamental changes in English society and the English church which made the Reformation inevitable, is academically stone dead.

A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution

To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.

If thou least fallen into sin through violent temptations, seek speedily for repentance for it, recovery out of it, and reformation from it.

The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.

Reformation ends not in contemplation, but in action.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.

Before my secret meeting with the Pope I asked him to come wearing white if deep down he agreed with the Reformation. Pretty crazy.

When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints - people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical.

The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.

It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical,--but, in general, those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults are unqualified for the work of reformation.

Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination

They waste life in what are called good resolutions-partial efforts at reformation, feebly commenced, heartlessly conducted, and hopelessly concluded.