*Not found in the Bible, but helpful to achieving the biblical goal of leading a wise and righteous life. They are listed with the oldest sources first.
“Hear, all you who are men of the world and have wives and children, how he [Paul] commands you in particular to read the Scriptures, and not lightly, but with great diligence… get yourselves Bibles, the medicine of the soul.”
– John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), Archbishop of Constantinople
“The laity ought to understand the faith. Since the doctrines of our faith are contained directly in the Scriptures, believers should have those Scriptures in a language they know well.”
“Holy Scripture is the preeminent authority for every Christian… completely independent of human traditions and statutes.”
“Forasmuch as the Bible contains Christ… it is a right intended for all nations to know the Scriptures.”
– John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1384), the first man to translate the Bible into English
“Since then your sere [meaning: serene] Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed [meaning: a direct, straightforward answer without hidden complexities]. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. [Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.] May God help me. Amen.”
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) This was his reply to the Diet of Worms on April 18, 1521. Many historians hold that the bracketed but not italicized sentences were not originally spoken, but rather added later by Luther’s supporters.
“In matters relating to the glory of God, the salvation of our souls and blessedness, every individual must stand alone before God and account for himself.”
– Six evangelical princes and the representatives of 14 Free Cities in the Protestatio of the Diet of Speyer (1529), giving rise to the term “Protestant.”
“I would to God that the plowman would sing a text of the Scripture at his plow and that the weaver would hum them to the tune of his shuttle… I wish that all women might read the Gospel and the Epistles of Paul.”
– Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), in his preface to the first printed Greek New Testament.
“I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy who drives the plough to know more of the Scriptures than you do.”
– William Tyndale (1494-1536), responding to a high-ranking clergyman who claimed society was better off with the Pope’s laws than God’s laws.
“A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it.”
– Martin Luther (1483-1546), who “translated the Bible into everyday German so that laypeople wouldn’t have to rely strictly on church elites.” – Google AI
“No clearer book has been written on earth than the Holy Scripture… It is written for the very purpose of making things clear, of teaching, and of comforting us, who are the common people.”
– Martin Luther (1483-1546), who “highlighted the simple clarity of the text for the everyday believer.” – Google AI
“Herein may princes learn how to govern their subjects; subjects, how to be obedient… husbands, how to love their wives; wives, how to obey their husbands… every state and condition of man may here find his lesson.”
– Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Archbishop of Canterbury in a preface to the Bible, specifically addressing those who thought commoners shouldn’t read Scripture.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
– John Adams (1735-1826), the first U.S. vice president and the second U.S. president
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”
– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”
– Horace Greeley (1811-1872)
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
– Lord Acton aka John Dalberg (1834-1902)
“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”
Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
– Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
“If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”
***
“Only one life, ’twill soon be past,
C. T. Studd (1860-1931)
Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
“For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935)
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
– G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
“To know Him and to make Him known”
Robert C. McQuilkin (1886-1952), and perhaps others before him
“The modern world imagines that it has outgrown religion. It has done nothing of the kind. It has merely forgotten it. And because it has forgotten it, it no longer understands itself.
Men do not realize that the whole framework of their moral judgments, their political habits, and even their intellectual methods were formed within a Christian society and cannot exist long outside it. When that framework breaks, they will not find themselves enlightened, but bewildered; not free, but enslaved; not rational, but confused.”
– Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
– H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963); for similar formulations, see Predecessor Trilemmas to the C. S. Lewis Trilemma
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.”
– Roger Scruton (1944-2020)
“I think it’s very difficult to be interested in history and not be interested in the figure of Jesus, because there’s a case for saying that he’s the most influential human being who’s ever lived.”
– Tom Holland (1968-) British historian, “one of the most popular and influential public historians in the world today” per Google AI
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