Commentaries Quotes & Sayings

Of all the commentaries on the Scriptures, good examples are the best. — John Donne

Today's connoisseurs of Sino-American relations seem to view the relationship through a dystopian prism; their gloomy commentaries are largely an assemblage of snapshots on contemporary interactions or day-to-day developments without a historical context. — Patrick Mendis

Typical news accounts and commentaries about school shootings and rampage killings rarely mention gender. — Jackson Katz

Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like. — D. A. Carson

The commentaries usually mention nine kinds of internal formations: desire, hatred, pride, ignorance, stubborn views, attachment, doubt, jealousy, and selfishness. Among these, the fundamental internal formation is ignorance, the lack of clear seeing. Ignorance is the raw material out of which the other internal formations are made. Although there are nine internal formations, because "desire" is always listed first, it is often used to represent all the internal formations. — Thich Nhat Hanh

It [the Quit India Resolution] was very far from being the Gita, but like Gita it suffered from flood of explanations, commentaries, and interpretations. — R.P. Noronha

From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it." (Orpheus, Salmon Reinach, 1932. See page 175 of the book here) — Salomon Reinach

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic. — David Slade

I've recently enjoyed the Paul Thomas Anderson commentaries and the David Fincher commentaries. — Jay Roach

A similar attitude causes some people to spurn the use of commentaries and similar resources in their Bible study, as if their own uninformed first impression is just as good as careful study using reference tools. It is becoming more and more common all the time to hear people say, 'I don't read commentaries and books about the Bible. I limit my study to the Bible itself.' That may sound very pious, but is it? Isn't it actually presumptuous? Are the written legacies of godly men of no value to us? Can someone who ignores study aids understand the Bible just as well as someone who is familiar with the scholarship of other godly teachers and pastors? — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Giddard presented them with a collection of Sulese memorabilia and commentaries. Loosely translated, some of them would have read: "The grass sparkled with dew droppings." Warton, I am not sure if that is intended as a beautiful or a horrible image. "I was tort to extinguish riyt from rong." Bede, apparently not. "Sulese are always inviting you to go for dinner to get murdered." Kian, it would seem from this that Sulese are enthusiastically hospitable, transparent of motive, and not very good at committing murder. All are grave errors. "Sulese food on heads with never eat hats." Cayde, Sulese order word important very is. It must learn you. — Jonathan Renshaw

I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way. — Jack Dee

Dear Sir: Yours of the 24th. asking 'the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law' is received. The mode is very simple, though laborious, and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read, and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone's Commentaries, and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty's Pleading, Greenleaf's Evidence, & Story's Equity &c. in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing. — Abraham Lincoln

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category. — Faye Wattleton

In saying that the truth is both said and not said by the philosopher (said and not said in the form of stammering), Aristotle was still close to the methods of interpretation used by grammarians in their commentaries on the poets. Symbolic or allegorical methods pointing out what was deliberately hidden by Homer behind the figure of Nestor or Ulysses.

But there is a difference however - and a crucial one - which is that for Aristotle the equivocation of the said and the not-said, this distance without gap which means that the truth is both hidden and present in the philosopher's words, this light that is shadow, is not the effect of an oracular kind of intentional secret or prudent reserve. If philosophers do not speak the truth, this is not because their indulgence wishes to protect men from its terrible face; it is because they lack a certain knowledge (savoir). — Michel Foucault

The process of making a movie has expanded in terms of effort and time for the director, doing commentaries for the DVD for example, finishing deleted scenes so they could be on the DVD, and doing things like a web blog. — David Cronenberg

I'll tell you what's more important than all the commentaries in your library: prayer. — Mark Dever

I've wanted to make movies for so long. I learned most of what I know from director commentaries and behind the scenes featurettes and criterions. — Todd Strauss-Schulson

I like doing commentary. As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things. I often like the technical commentaries myself. — Catherine Hardwicke

Bernard of Clairvaux shared with Goethe and Balzac the art of charging narratives with his own charisma (and this is probably the only context in which those three names can be mentioned in one breath). On the surface self-representation was not the purpose of such narratives; they presented themselves as fiction or as commentaries on scripture. Let me suggest the word 'autography' to describe the process. 'Autography' is writing yourself into your own composition, not by describing yourself, but by infusing your own presence into it. The reader feels your presence, but sees someone or something else. — C. Stephen Jaeger

Portraits of the Mind is a remarkable book that combines beautifully reproduced illustrations of the nervous system as it has been visualized over the centuries, as well as lively and authoritative commentaries by some of today's leading neuroscientists. It will be enjoyed by professionals and general readers alike. — Dale Purves

And his paths shall be many, and who shall know his name, for he shall be beorn among us many times, in many guises, as he has been and ever will be, time without end. His coming shall be like the sharp edge of the plow, turning our lives in furrows form out of the places where we lie in our silence. The breaker of binds; the forger of chains. The maker of futures; the unshaper of destiny.
-from Commentaries on the Prophecies of the Dragon, by Jurith Dorine, Right Hand to the Queen of Almoren, 742 AB, the Third Age — Robert Jordan

I write music, it's performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music. — Dmitri Shostakovich

Jews seek to cleave to the will of God as set forth in the Bible and, particularly, the Pentateuch, with its rabbinic commentaries, the Mishnah and Talmud. — Meir Soloveichik

In the white man's world, language, too
and the way which the white man thinks of it
has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language
for the Word itself
as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word. — N. Scott Momaday

When I talk to film students, I always say, 'Buy the DVDs and listen to the commentaries, look at the making of, look at the behind-the-scenes,' because that's such a great learning tool. — Catherine Hardwicke

It is an incredible thing to see how many crazy things get thrown out that people then often write commentaries about how happy they are or how disappointed they are about something that's completely false. But, it's a lot of noise, frankly. — J.J. Abrams

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds. — A.S. Byatt

I'm one of those weird people that tends to not do the extras and listen to the commentaries and stuff on movies, although I do think they are fascinating and interesting - I'm just so worried that years later I wouldn't remember anything! — Richard Thomas

Gus hated feeling anxious. He also hated warm ketchup, loud people, sunburns, parallel parking, jams and jellies, Instagram, Sarah McLachlan's SPCA commercials, rubber glue, Michael Bay's DVD commentaries, Michael Bay's films, Michael Bay, and that weird feeling that tattooed, bearded hipster caused in the pit of his stomach that felt like he had tripped down a flight of stairs into a frozen lake that got lit on fire. — T.J. Klune

I kind of don't like doing film commentaries because I think they're kind of weird. — Peter Segal

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke. — George Santayana

As my audience grew more diverse, I started interjecting social justice advocacy and commentaries about LGBT equality, and it just kept growing more. — George Takei

Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs. — Henry Ward Beecher

It is amazing how much light the Bible shines on commentaries — Howard G. Hendricks

We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare. — Charles Dance

Unless I have hallucinated, I have never made an anti-gay commentary, I have made anti-gay-activist-agenda commentaries. — Laura Schlessinger

But some survive. Many of us have lived to tell our stories, to create Lesbian texts, to read Lesbian texts, even to write commentaries and criticisms of Lesbian texts. All of these activities must be pluralized, multiplied, complicated, and pluralized again, because there is no single, narrow, one-sentence definition of "The Lesbian." The sexologists may have been the ones to name us, but we can, and do, create ourselves. Our of a mishmash of disinformation, misinformation and outright lies, each Lesbian constructs some story about who she is and who she might someday be ... — Julia Penelope

There has come into fashion a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing facts and all gloomy questions. — Victor Hugo

I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church, and I'm not joking, — Raul Castro

According to our best understanding of the universe and equally according to the most ancient commentaries on the book of Genesis, there was only one physical creation. Science refers to it as the big bang. The Bible calls it the creation of the heavens and the earth. Every physical object in this vast universe, including our human bodies, is built of the light of creation. — Gerald Schroeder

Sanity and enlightenment ... I've been reading a new book Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries, and it contains a commentary on Genjo Koan by Shunryu Suzuki, the author who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He doesn't mention sanity at all but I think that one possible definition of enlightenment would be a kind of profound sanity, where being insane is no longer an option. — Brad Warner

The ultimate space-measurer in Dutch football is of course, Johan Cruyff. He was only seventeen when he first played at Ajax, yet even then he delivered running commentaries on the use of space to the rest of the team, telling them where to run, where not to run. Players did what the tiny, skinny teenager told them to do because he was right. Cruyff didn't talk about abstract space but about specific, detailed spatial relations on the field. Indeed, the most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing. 'No, not there, back a little... forward two metres... four metres more to the left.' He seemed like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra. It was as if Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realize an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered. — David Winner

There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upon the waistline and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their public school will find that between, say, Caesar's Commentaries in limp cloth and this Jeeves book there is no comparison as a missile in an inter-study brawl. — P.G. Wodehouse

Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of the mind, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is actually an oxymoron. When you're in your mind, you're hardly ever at peace, and when you're at peace, you're never only in your mind. — Richard Rohr

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses - 'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing' - along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them. — Christopher Hitchens

When you're given the gift of truth, you spend a lot of time trying to tone it down because it is already offensive enough. — Shannon L. Alder

[On the New Testament:] I ... must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the men who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the men who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we [women] are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have. — Sarah Moore Grimke

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity. — Michel De Montaigne

I'd made pretty clear to the people at Paramount and Dreamworks that, if they wanted Lemony Snicket to comment, he would be completely horrified by the entire film. And as long as they understood that, it was okay. I'm not much of a fan of DVD commentaries myself, so this was my way of getting revenge, in a sense, for all the puffed-up directors and stars who talk endlessly about the self-aggrandizing minutiae of making a movie. — Daniel Handler

I don't know what DVD commentaries are about. I'd like to strangle the person who came up with that concept. — Abel Ferrara

Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we're going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he's read and written. — Jerry B. Jenkins

I would contend that it is more accurate to say there's no good person or evil person among those who die...Many [Shin commentaries] say the good person relies on self-power in an effort to achieve birth in the Pure Land, while the evil person does not operate in that way. Various explanations are brought forth, but the peaceful composure of the faces of the dead are completely oblivious to these weary arguments. — Shinmon Aoki

I recall once seeing a commentary advertised as having been written in prison without recourse to other commentaries and by reliance on the Holy Spirit alone. I doubt whether those last two phrases are complementary. If God has set teachers in the church (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11) and many have written books, can good come out of ignoring them, let along parading that ignorance as glorifying God? God's work is never a one-man show. The one who represents the visible part of the iceberg must ever ackowledge his or her debt to others. I like to remember that the First Epistle to the Corinthians was from Paul and Sosthenes (1 Cor. 1:1) and that the Epistle to the Colossians was from Paul and Timothy. — Leslie Allen

Whatever else it may be, the Qur'an is no work of history. Startlingly, were it not for all the commentaries elucidating its mysteries, all the biographies of the Prophet, and all the sprawling collections of hadiths - none of which, in the form we have them, pre-dates the beginning of the third century after the hijra - we would have only the barest reason to associate it with a man named — Tom Holland

The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation. — Rabindranath Tagore

The Shadow shall rise across the world, and darken every land, even to the smallest corner, and there shall be neither Light nor safety. And he who shall be born of the Dawn, born of the Maiden, according to Prophecy, he shall stretch forth his hands to catch the Shadow, and the world shall scream in the pain of salvation. All Glory be to the Creator, and to the Light, and to he sho shall be born again. May the Light save us from him.
-from Commentaries on the Karaethon Cycle Sereine dar Shamelle Motara Counsel-Sister to Comaelle, High Queen of Jaramide (circa 325 AB, the Third Age) — Robert Jordan

No books is more fascinating than the Bible. And no books are less fascinating than most of our commentaries on the Bible. Nothing is more formidable and unconquerable than the Church Militant. But nothing is more sleepy and sheepish than the Church Mumbling. Christ's words roused His enemies to murder and His friends to martyrdom. Our words reassure both sides and send them to sleep. He put the world in a daze. We put it in a doze. — Peter Kreeft

All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth. — Michel De Montaigne

Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent should suffer. - Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766) — Anonymous

What good are Greek, commentaries, insight, gift, and all the rest, if there is no heart for Christ? — Jim Elliot

Exegetical commentaries on the books of the Bible come in all shapes and sizes. Harold Hoehner's new volume on Ephesians has both a distinctive shape and a monumental size. Its value lies in its attention to detail and its full discussion of all relevant and disputed points. The volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students. Not all Hoehner's conclusions will command consent, but he has produced a stout and readable volume that all will turn to for guidance and help. — Ralph P. Martin

Try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves. — Steven Hall

The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Holiness in Jewish thought refers to energy and not an expression of personhood. Never in rabbinical commentaries is the Spirit considered as an entity separate from God, even though at times it is used as synonymous with God and interchangeable with Shekinah (majesty of God present among men and in nature: immanence). — Vince McLaughlin

He had written commentaries for the Journal suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat they ate - just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviors might increase health and well-being. After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors a great deal; had created the species Homo sapiens; had blown their brains up like balloons. Surely these were behaviors most likely to lead to well-being now. And to the extent they neglected these behaviors, and sat around inside boxes as if they were nothing but brains and fingertips, the unhealthier and unhappier they would be. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Hamid notes that the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that this verse means "that Muslims must fight non-Muslims and offer them the following choices: Convert to Islam, pay a humiliating tax called jizyah or be killed." Indeed, he adds, "A basic search of almost ALL approved interpretations for the Quran supports the same violent conclusion. The 25 leading approved Quran Interpretations (commentaries) - that are usually used by Muslims to understand the Quran - unambiguously support the violent understanding of the verse."15 — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Carol and I have found that unless God baptizes us with fresh outpourings of love, we would leave New York City yesterday! We don't live in this crowded, ill-mannered, violent city because we like it. Whenever I meet or read about a guy who has sexually abused a little girl, I'm tempted in my flesh to throw him out a fifth-story window. This isn't an easy place for love to flourish. But Christ died for that man. What could ever change him? What could ever replace the lust and violence in his heart? He isn't likely to read the theological commentaries on my bookshelves. He desperately needs to be surprised by the power of a loving, almighty God. If the Spirit is not keeping my heart in line with my doctrine, something crucial is missing. I can affirm the existence of Jesus Christ all I want, but in order to be effective, he must come alive in my life in a way that even the pedophile, the prostitute, and the pusher can see. — Jim Cymbala

To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive ... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful' ... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness ... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed ... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92).
For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts — Maxine Hong Kingston

At the same distance from it is the city of Sala, situate on a river which bears the same name, a place which stands upon the very verge of the desert, and though infested by troops of elephants, is much more exposed to the attacks of the nation of the Autololes, through whose country lies the road to Mount Atlas, the most fabulous locality even in Africa.
[ ... ] There formerly existed some Commentaries written by Hanno, a Carthaginian general, who was commanded, in the most flourishing times of the Punic state, to explore the sea-coast of Africa. The greater part of the Greek and Roman writers have followed him, and have related, among other fabulous stories, that many cities there were founded by him, of which no remembrance, nor yet the slightest vestige, now exists. [V,1] — Pliny The Elder

While facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism. — Jorge Luis Borges

Reading the Koran on its own terms, trying to interpret it without resorting to commentaries, is a difficult and questionable exercise because of the nature of the text-its allusive and referential style and its grammatical and logical discontinuities, as well as our lack of sure information about its origins and the circumstances of its composition. Often such a reading seems arbitrary and necessarily inconclusive.
G. R. Hawting — Ibn Warraq

The commentaries on the Commedia also began stacking up at my bedside and on the bookshelf next to my chair in the den. There was Charles Williams's The Face of Beatrice, Harriet Rubin's Dante in Love, Yale scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta's Reading Dante, and later the galleys for English Dantist Prue Shaw's Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. Most important of all, I began listening to the Great Courses audio lectures by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman, which made the poem come alive like nothing else. — Rod Dreher

At first I was blogging everyday, but I don't do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I'll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it'll just be new work that I'm doing. — Stephen Vincent Benet

It may be added, that the same change took place in dogmatic teaching, as in the exposition of Scripture. This indeed was still more to be expected, for the issue of controversies and the decrees of Councils had given to the doctrinal statements of the Fathers an authority, or rather prerogative, which was never claimed for their commentaries. Accordingly, S. John Damascene's work on the Orthodox Faith in the viiith century is scarcely more than a careful selection and combination of sentences and phrases from the great theologians who preceded him, principally S. Gregory Nazianzen. A comment or scholia by the same author upon S. Paul's Epistles have come down to us, which are mainly taken from S. Chrysostom, but with some use of other expositors. — Thomas Aquinas

When DVDs finally disappear, I'm going to be sad. I'll miss the commentaries. — Matt Groening

Do not study commentaries, lesson helps or other books about the Bible: study the Bible itself. Do not study about the Bible, study the Bible. The Bible is the Word of God, and only the Bible is the Word of God. — R.A. Torrey

I do everything from home. I broadcast commentaries for CBS News Radio every day - from home, on a disk that I mail in. I write a weekly op-ed piece for the 'New York Daily News,' and any books or plays or movies that I'm crazy enough to write, I do that from home. — Charles Grodin

Chinese commentaries stress the opportunity that the investments and aid they offer presents to developing countries to avoid the hazards of reliance on Western dominated financial institutions: austerity programs that call for severe cuts in state-subsidized social welfare, deregulation of state-owned facilities, trade liberalization, and an open door for multinational corporation investment. — Melvin Gurtov

[There is less precision in the Chinese than I have thought it well to introduce into my translation, and the commentaries on the passage are by no means explicit. But, having regard to the context, we can hardly doubt that Sun Tzu is holding up I Chih and Lu Ya as illustrious — Sun Tzu

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library. — Michel Foucault

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with - except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection - is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households ... writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. — Clifford Geertz

In general, [ ... ] novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries. — Gore Vidal

It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of religion, their own misery, the necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; to stir up the pure minds of the saints, quicken their affections by often bringing the great things of religion in their remembrance, and setting them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already. — Jonathan Edwards

There can be no substitute for a personal study of the Word of God! Daily devotionals, Bible commentaries, and recorded messages by anointed preachers and teachers are wonderful and useful. However, they cannot take the place of the Word of God. They must not replace a time of personal study of the Word. Every Christian individual must study and meditate upon the Word for him or herself. Nobody can do that for anyone else. — Pedro Okoro

I don't do commentaries on films because A) I'm not very good at it and B) it's an odd thing that I discovered, on my first film, that you go through this really intense experience of making a film and then you sit in a little room with a monitor and you reduce the thing to a bunch of silly anecdotes. It's really unfulfilling and I've never really enjoyed listening to them anyway, so I just don't do them. — David Slade

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 is 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. In fact, I love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to dream. — Henry David Thoreau

Forty of Paracelsus's theological manuscripts still survive, as well as sixteen Bible commentaries, twenty sermons, twenty works on the Eucharist, and seven on the Virgin Mary. Half of these have never been properly edited, let alone printed in modern form. There is no question that Paracelsus thought long and hard about Christianity, and by styling himself a professor of theology (without, it seems, any official academic sanction) he implies that he regarded this component of his output to be the equal of his medical and chemical theories. That his role in the history of science and medicine has received far more attention than his theological oeuvre is, however, understandable and probably apt, for it cannot be said that he had much influence even on the religious debates of his day. In theology he never aspired to be a Luther, and that would in any case have been a futile aspiration for one so lacking in political acumen or the ability to foster disciples. — Philip Ball