Marilynne Robinson Quotes

A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form - is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith.

People are so difficult. Give me an elephant any day.

Interviewing people is hard.

A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.

I've read the Bible. I think the Bible's a great book, but it's a novel. It's beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

I think the jobs [at the top] are unbelievably difficult, and there is nothing easier than second-guessing people.

Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. As a student of world religions, I see religion as the winnower of the wisdom of the human race. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example - master-slave, caste, and gender relations - have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them.

Religion may indeed inspire acts of great kindness and courage. But it also trains people to believe things for which there is no evidence. This makes religion's intrusion into the political sphere all the more troubling.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

God does not bestow his spirit on his people in order to set aside the use of his word, but rather to render it fruitful.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

The Bible defines almost nothing because it isn't a book for scholars and philosophers or free thinkers. It's a book for people who want help. It's primarily a book for pastors. They're the ones that can use it in a way so that it actually achieves its purpose.

The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.

If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount.

I read the Bible sometimes, but it bores me to death. I just want to know what other people find so bloody fascinating.

I'll never forget what a Catholic priest told me; he said, "If you try to padlock the door, you have to give people an alternative path - an alternative, safer path. You can't padlock, and you shouldn't padlock a burning building."

Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.

I would like to be a parson on this island. Explain the Sermon on the Mount to ordinary people and let the world be the world.

I think that trying to invest through 535 people is a tough job, you know, and so I would give more latitude.

A mathematical problem should be difficult in order to entice us, yet not completely inaccessible, lest it mock at our efforts. It should be to us a guide post on the mazy paths to hidden truths, and ultimately a reminder of our pleasure in the successful solution.

We deal five minutes with a person and their conversion and then we spend the next fifty years trying to disciple a goat into a sheep. I'm not saying this because I'm angry. I'm saying this because countless people are being deceived.

People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day - even hour to hour.

I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law. The Law is the needle, and you cannot draw the silken thread of the gospel through a man’s heart unless you first send the needle of the Law to make way for it.

The Bible is our fire-guard. Some read God's Word critically but the Word is their critic and by their own attitude towards the Word they condemn themselves.

There is no other book so various as the Bible, nor one so full of concentrated wisdom.