#sermon

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible. ↗

— George Burns

#close #ending #good #having #possible

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral. ↗

— John Burroughs

#easier #get #moral #more #out

TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance. ↗

— Rebecca Harding Davis

#benefit #chance #could #credit #edit

In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert. ↗

— Alan Dershowitz

#everyone #go #had #like #listen

It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher. ↗

— George Whitefield

#gives #hearer #himself #makes #neither

You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips. ↗

— Oliver Goldsmith

#life #lips #preach #sermon #than

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer. ↗

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

#flag #most #mount #people #rudder

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#had #i #only #preach #pride

A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable. ↗

— Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

#afflict #afflicted #also #comfort #comfortable

The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces, sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the Word for the letters, or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle that anything which is Divine must necessarily be a myth. Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#democracy #jesus #secular-humanism #sermon-on-the-mount #the-cross