Sydney Smith Quotes

I've been known to preach.

There are many preachers who don't hear themselves.

Preaching, in the first sense of the word, ceased as soon as ever the gospel was written.

On Sunday morning, I'm not nervous... I can't wait to tell what God wants me to say.

I'm a reverend and a pastor. A pastor of the church. I go by usually pastor.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.

I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman's family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind.

After I'd preached a message on Sunday night, I'd print it up.

My father was a good preacher and had a little bit of drama.

My dad was a Methodist minister.

There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

It is indeed better … that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage … in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching…

They have otherwise no Religion: when we pray, they laugh at us; some of them despise it entirely, and some when we tell them what we do when we pray, stand astonished. When we have a Sermon, sometimes ten or twelve of them, more or less, will attend, each having a long Tobacco Pipe, made by himself, in his mouth, and will stand a while and look, and afterwards ask me what I was doing and what I wanted, that I stood there alone and made so many Words, and none of the rest might speak? I tell them I admonished the Christians, that they must not steal, ... get drunk, or commit Murder, and that they too ought not to do these Things, and that I intend after a while to preach to them, ... They say I do well in teaching the Christians, but immediately [ask] why do so many Christians do these Things.

One of the most disconcerting phenomena of these times is the disparity between the enormous amount of idealist propaganda that goes on from pulpit, platform and press, and the inconsiderable effect that it seems to produce in the actual conduct of men and of nations.

If I started preaching politics from the pulpit, our church would empty overnight. That's not why people come to church. They want to hear the word of God being proclaimed, not the word of Robert Jeffress.

My mother was a minister, so I grew up in a church. My grandfather was a minister; there are a bunch of ministers in my family.

My parents are ministers.

There's no distinction. A teacher is a preacher. The teachers in public schools are preachers, and the preachers in church are teachers.

My father was a minister, so I was raised in the church.

Before I was a journalist, I was a preacher in Georgia and Kentucky.

My job is to preach and preach and preach.

The bells themselves are the best of preachers, Their brazen lips are learned teachers, From their pulpits of stone, in the upper air, Sounding aloft, without crack or flaw, Shriller than trumpets under the Law, Now a sermon and now a prayer.

All of my books began as sermons, so really the heart of the message is still the same.

He that has but one word of God before him, and out of that word cannot make a sermon, can never be a preacher.