Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.

To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.

Whenever the average intellect of the clergy declines in the balance with the average intellect of the people the churches will be shut up and a new order of things [will] begin.

To reconceive the Christ! It is the special task of our age.

It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.

Downstairs, Grandad's warning Barron about something. His voice swells, and I catch the words, "In my day we were feared. Now we're just afraid.

Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake.

As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.

Someday you will read in the papers that Moody is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I was born of the flesh in 1837, I was born of the spirit in 1855. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit shall live forever.

They knew only too well the intimate bond which unites faith with worship, 'the law of belief with the law of prayer,' and so, under the pretext of restoring it to its primitive form, they corrupted the order of the liturgy in many respects to adapt it to the errors of the Innovators.

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you aren't old enough. The reason old people believe in God is because they've given up believing in anything else, and one can't exist without faith in something.... God is a sort of burglar. As a young man you knock him down; as an old man, you try to conciliate him because he may knock you down. Moral: don't grow old.

Protestants, from the first, have been distinguished from their opponents by what they do not believe; to throw over one more dogma is, therefore, merely to carry the movement one stage further. Moral fervor is the essence of the matter.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

Time would fail me were I to try to lay before you in order all the passages in the Holy Scriptures which relate to the efficacy of baptism or to explain the mysterious doctrine of that second birth which though it is our second is yet our first in Christ.

The real ecumenical crisis today is not between Catholics and Protestants but between traditional and experimental forms of church life.

We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.

I never felt pretty. I don't feel pretty now. I'm not a pretty person. I don't like pretty. So I don't feel badly. And I think it worked out well, because I found that all the girls I know who got by on their looks, as time went on and they faded, they were nothing. And they were very disappointed. When you're somebody like myself, in order to get around and be attractive, you have to develop something, you have to learn something, you have to do something. So you become a bit more interesting.

Only the schools’ inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25.

If the fraud charges are proven, fraud order...is issued, a promoter can receive no funds through the mail..., shut off. All mail sent to him is returned to the sender marked 'Fraudulent'.

If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

I think the Catholic and Protestant churches have become very stagnant.

I believe that all the churches are going to continue to grow. I think faith in America is at an all-time high. And I think as we continue to help people and to change with the time, to be relevant and practical.

I'm not convinced that the world is in any worse shape than it ever was. It's just that in this age of almost instantaneous communication, we bear the weight of problems our forefathers only read about after they were solved.

Having lots of members of my family who were in ministry in one form or another, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that at quite an early age, I was very, very conscious personally of the love of God.

We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.