Church Organ Quotes & Sayings

Some men are like a church-organ
you can play on them for a lifetime and always find new harmonies; others are like a music-box
they have four or five thin jingles. — Austin O'Malley

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house. — Benjamin Britten

Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think, begin with evil intent. The devil, after all, is a spiritual being. His usual mode of temptation is not an obvious evil but to an apparent good. The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but flourish under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music. — Eugene H. Peterson

Something in Mama's voice was vast and high, like a rainbow; yet something sad and deep, like when the organ played in church, was around Mama's words. — Ralph Ellison

Cole, I know I haven't earned it, but would you mind very much if I tried the organ?" Blake's voice filled the empty church.
Cole smiled sadly. "Of course, brother. It would be an honor to hear you play again."
Cole's despair settled into his bones. His crying soul now had the worst kind of company: another soul crying just as loud. — Debra Anastasia

I give money for church organs in the hope the organ music will distract the congregation's attention from the rest of the service. — Andrew Carnegie

Misner walked away from the pulpit, to the rear wall of the church. There he stretched, reaching up until he was able to unhook the cross that hung there. He carried it then, past the empty choir stall, past the organ where Kate sat, the chair where Pulliam was, on to the podium and held it before him for all to see - if only they would ... Without this sign, the believer's life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. The praise was credit; the hits were interest due on a debt that could never be paid ... But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well, life was a whole other matter. — Toni Morrison

But that Herschel, for example, who "broke the barriers of the heavens" - did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course towards final companionship with the immortals. — George Eliot

So the technology that does the least alteration of nature, the least harm to other species and systems, and provides the greatest intimacy of human with nature, is the best. We could make a scale with that in mind, and judge any technology by its place on that scale: speech and eyeglasses, say, would rank low; nuclear bombs and coal plants, high. — Kirkpatrick Sale

If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soul and eternity of one man depends upon the voice of another — Horatius Bonar

Whoever isolates himself from the church, i.e., from Christianity as a whole, from the history of dogma in its entirety, loses the truth of the Christian faith. That person becomes a branch that is torn from the tree and shrivels, an organ that is separated from the body and therefore doomed to die. Only within the communion of the saints can the length and the breadth, the depth and the height, of the love of Christ be comprehended. — Herman Bavinck

My love for you sings, and it's a song that will never stop playing. It will play through our deaths and beyond that. And this I know. — Karina Halle

A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don't dance, they don't sway. That's not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God's love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself. (48) — Timothy Schaffert

I grew up in church. That's how most young African American musicians learn how to perform. You could be six years old and playing organ or drums in front of thousands or hundreds of people. — Robert Glasper

On Saturday night, I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning when I was playing organ for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday they'd be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence. I knew then that the Christian church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man's carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion. — Anton Szandor LaVey

Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature. — William Shenstone

There is no dogma that the organ or harmonium can be used in church, but not the drum. — Francis Arinze

To be standing together in a frosty field, looking up into the sky, marvelling at birds and revelling in the natural world around us, was a simple miracle. And I wondered why we were so rarely able to appreciate it. — Lynn Thomson

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will
that is the part that's almost unbearable. — Curtis Sittenfeld

He said he would not yield his judgment to anything proposed by the Church, or any individuals of the Church, or even the Great I Am, given through the appointed organ, as revelation, but would always act upon his own judgment, let him believe in whatever religion he might. He stated he would always say what he pleased, for he was a Republican, and as such would do, say, act, and believe what he pleased.
Mark such republicanism as this! A man to oppose his own judgment to the judgment of God, and at the same time to profess to believe in that same God, who has said: "The foolishness of God is wiser than man; and the weakness of God is stronger, than man."
[DHC3:66] — Joseph Smith Jr.

The Council of Nicaea. An ecumenical council was a new experiment. Local councils had long since grown to be a recognised organ of the Church both for legislation and for judicial proceedings. But no precedent as yet prescribed, no ecclesiastical law or theological principle had as yet enthroned, the 'General Council' as the supreme expression of the Church's mind. — Philip Schaff

In all things involving Nora Sutherlin, proceed with caution. — Tiffany Reisz

My earliest memories about music are connected with going to church and listening to organ music. I am not from a musical family, actually, and I remember my first musical fascination to be for organ music. I wanted to become an organist and not a pianist. — Rafal Blechacz

Life is not a long vacation, but a constant learning process. — Paulo Coelho

My mother has stories of leaving me in the bath as small kid, like a 3-year-old, and there being mirrors on the side, and her going to get a towel and coming back in, and me making faces at myself, like, 'Now I'm happy. Now I'm sad.' — Allison Tolman

When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal. — Siri Mitchell

If you are called upon to play a church service, it is a greater honor than if you were to play a concert on the finest organ in the world ... Thank God each time when you are privileged to sit before the organ console and assist in the worship of the Almighty. — Albert Schweitzer

Music was a central part of my childhood because my mother played organ and piano in the church, and that meant all us kids had to be in the church choir. — Michael Franti

When I was a kid in Michigan, I used to play ball with a town team on Sunday. Of course, I'd go to church first. Played the church organ, as a matter of fact. — Larry MacPhail