Biblical Literature Quotes

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

It appears a bold thing to say so when one sees how much many a modern author who knows how to make a skilful use of the Book of Chronicles has to tell about the tabernacle.

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. [...] It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.

My interest in gospel music and liturgical art and Biblically-inspired literature has nothing to do with organised religion and everything to do with human beings trying to figure out their place on this planet.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.

Jeremiah is a most melancholy prophet. He wails from beginning to end; he is often childish, is rarely indecent, and although it may be blasphemy to say so, he and his 'Lamentations' are really not worth reading.

One had better put on gloves before handling the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it highly advisable.

I know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

The pure and noble, the graceful and dignified, simplicity of language is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scriptures and Homer. The whole book of Job, with regard both to sublimity of thought and morality, exceeds, beyond all comparison, the most noble parts of Homer.

[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus.

No one has written the way Isaiah does. The royal style, the majesty of the language. He is called the prince of the prophets. No one has written like that. I've studied ancient literature, Homer, for example, but it's not the same thing.

The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast.

Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

I call that [Book of Job], apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.

The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.

The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book.

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I learned from this exercise was not to begin a sentence with "And." When I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with "And," I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves at that time was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible.

The Bible is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique book.

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

The Psalms, the anthology of the hymns of Israel, are still used by Christians.

To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom.