Sacred Literature Quotes

The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.

This is the Book. I have read the Bible through many times, and now make it a practice to read it through once every year. It is a book of all others for lawyers, as well as divines; and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct. It fits man for life--it prepares him for death.

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.

[Why] should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book? Its morals are pure, its examples captivating and noble. The reverence for the Sacred Book that is thus early impressed lasts long; and probably if not impressed in infancy, never takes firm hold of the mind.

The scriptures are in print what Christ is in person.

The Bible is the best of books, and I wish it were in the hands of every one. It is indispensable to the safety and permanence of our institutions. A free government can not exist without religion and morals, and there cannot be morals without religion. Especially should the Bible be placed in the hands of the young. It is the best school book in the world. I would that all our people were brought up under the influence of that holy book.

In Job and the Psalms we shall find more sublime ideas, more elevated language, than in any of the heathen versifiers of Greece or Rome.

The Bhagavad-Gita is a true scripture of the human race a living creation rather than a book, with a new message for every age and a new meaning for every civilization.

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.

The Bible is actually a library of books-some long, some short- written over hundreds of years by many authors. Behind each one, however, was [the] Author: the Spirit of God.

I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

However often we turn to it [the Koran] at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence. . . . Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible - ever and anon truly sublime - Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence.

The Bible has been a bestseller for centuries. Why should I let two thousand years of publicity go to waste?

As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.

There's things in the Bible when you read the Quran there different wordings. The Quran is dealing with the Most High and the Bible is dealing with God. If they read them both and put it together they'll know what the true culture is.

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.

Scripture is the most up-to-date and relevant reading that ever comes my way.

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

You all know that certain things are necessary to make a religion. First of all, there is the book. The power of the book is simply marvellous! Whatever it be, the book is the centre round which human allegiance gathers. Not one religion is living today but has a book. With all its rationalism and tall talk, humanity still clings to the books. In your country every attempt to start a religion without a book has failed. In India sects rise with great success, but within a few years they die down, because there is no book behind them. So in every other country.

We are sometimes told that we are not a biblical church. We are a biblical church. This wonderful testament of the Old World, this great and good Holy Bible is one of our standard works. We teach from it. We bear testimony of it. We read from it. It strengthens our testimony. And we add to that this great second witness, the Book of Mormon, the testament of the New World, for as the Bible says, "In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall [all things] be established" (2 Cor. 13:1).

In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-Gita with full understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it.

God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.

While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.