Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I've been known to preach.

Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.

I don't ever preach to people.

I don't want to preach to anyone, because I'm not.

I don't wanna be preached to. Unless it's in a beautiful voice, I don't want that.

I don't want to preach to people.

Preaching has become a byword for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of everything agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon.

I'd make a bad preacher.

When I speak at my local church, which I try to do 35 to 40 times a year, I try in every lesson to take the Old Testament text or New Testament text and apply them to what is happening to me or how that applies to the audience that I'm teaching in a modern, fast-changing, technological world. I use headlines, interfaith and that sort of thing.

I think that a church should be setting the pace for social justice.

I never read a self-help book except for the Bible.

A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.

A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse.

I think Bible principles are principles for life.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

When the congregation becomes the norm by which sermons are measured, a minister has put a mortgage on his soul.

I am a pastor, and I teach and preach the Bible to my congregation every week. But the Bible is not a manufacturer's handbook. Neither is it a science textbook nor a guidebook for public policy.

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

In the pulpit, we're supposed to present the teaching with all of its unvarnished clarity, but when you step out of the pulpit, you have to meet people where they are and try to walk with them.

In the past, children learned their values at home, reinforced by organizations such as the Boy Scouts and, of course, their church or synagogue, but in all too many families that is no longer the case.

It is our responsibility to speak on social and moral issues for the instruction of the church and its members.

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…

There are many preachers who don't hear themselves.

Our ministers are well paid, and by my consent should be better if they would pray oftener and preach less.

The words of Jesus, as distinguishable from the matter in which they are embedded as diamonds in dunghills. A more precious morsel of ethics was never seen.