Biblical Imagery Quotes

Seeing 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' was an extraordinary experience because it made me realise that all the biblical stories and images I'd ignored as a child had sunk in by osmosis. I saw that my childhood was deeply rooted inside me.

A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

To adore the conqueror, who now beholds Cherub and seraph rolling in the flood.

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

All the honey that can be gathered from the flowers of this world has less sweetness than the vinegar and gall of Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Bible says that the devil is like a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8). He comes in the darkness, and tries to frighten the children of God with his mighty roar. But when you switch on the light of the Word of God, you discover that there is no lion. There is only a mouse with a microphone! The devil is an imposter. Got it?

I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.

And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove.Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.

The birth of Jesus is the sunrise in the Bible.

Down sank the great red sun, and in golden, glimmering vapors Veiled the light of his face, like the Prophet descending from Sinai.

Yes, would to God that I could persuade the rich and the mighty that they would permit the whole Bible to be painted on houses, on the inside and the outside, so that all can see it. That would be a Christian work... If it is not a sin but good to have the image of Christ in my heart, why should it be a sin to have it in my eyes? This is especially true since the heart is more important than the eyes, and should be less stained by sin because it is the true abode and dwelling place of God.

Gospel songs to me are about the mansion in the sky, and washed in the blood of Christ's crimson blood, songs that are filled with biblical wording that's no longer understood by a lot of people.

To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.

One of the first places where I started to respond to song lyrics was in reggae music. A lot of what I was responding to were references to the Old Testament. It was not that I had to adapt the lyrics to the sound. Reggae and the Old Testament are bound up together. There wasn't anything that I had to do.

Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes.

I'd have to think about it, but I was listening to this Johnny Cash song today that Tom Waits wrote for him - I think that's the story. For some reason it's a thing that sticks in my brain. He's describing this scene where he sees all these almost biblical images happening kind of in this burrow where this biblical train runs through this yard.

'Pomegranate,' started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.