Greek Orthodox Quotes & Sayings

I rebel - therefore we exist — Albert Camus

I think it's Greek Orthodox - who totally believes in the pope, not anything about attacking the United States, which needs to be because we're not recognizing the dignity of all people. — Rush Limbaugh

Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent. — Immanuel Kant

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as their subjects paid taxes and provided recruits to the harems and armies of the Sultan, they could have whatever religion they liked. Only when they joined religion with revolt did scimitars and stakes come out. Orthodox Christianity was under far greater threat from the Roman variety imposed by Venetians and Franks and Catalans. Jews too were safer from pogrom under the crescent than the cross. This is not a line of thought that goes down well in Greek company. — John Mole

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You see, my father was a Catholic priest, Greek Orthodox, but I think he started out as a Jew, then he became a Catholic priest. — Walter Matthau

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences. — Jonathan Lethem

You know what I do on Sundays? I sing in a choir. I sing in a Greek Orthodox choir, and I'm the only hillbilly tenor in the Orthodox Church. — Chris Hillman

Sergeant Pietro Oliva was a good Catholic. He liked to go into a church and cross himself, genuflect to the alter, and then settle down to a little prayer and contemplation, savouring the coolness, the heavy odours, the darkness, and the sensation of being soaked in the atmosphere of centuries' worth of devotion that hung in the tenebrous and golden air of churches. — Louis De Bernieres

My grandson was circumcised today. I was surprised how easily my son-in-law accepted his son's circumcision. He is Christian, Greek Orthodox. I think it is a good thing it happened. During the war, they were exchanging corpses of dead fighters on both sides. The Christians found out they had eighteen unidentified corpses. They weren't sure whether to send them to West Beirut or keep them. Bashir Gemayel told them to undress the corpses. If they were circumcised, send them to West Beirut. If they happened to be circumcised Christians, they deserve to be buried with Muslims. — Rabih Alameddine

I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own. — Alice Notley

It has frequently been asserted that low Christologies are "Jewish" ones, while high Christologies have come into Christianity from the Greek thought world. Oddly enough, this position has been taken both by Jewish writers seeking to discredit Christianity as a kind of paganism and by orthodox Christian scholars wishing to distinguish the "new religion" from the old one as far and as quickly as possible. This doubly defensive approach can no longer be maintained. — Daniel Boyarin

You sure have a high opinion of yourself, thinking it's going to happen again. — Richelle Mead

When I prayed I was new," wrote a great theologian of Christian antiquity, "but when I stopped praying I became old." Prayer is the way to renewal and spiritual life. Prayer is aliveness to God. Prayer is strength, refreshment, and joy. — Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Of America

Before I wasn't sure what I wanted to say, but now, I have had so many different experiences that they have given me what I want to get across in my music. — Hilary Duff

Like most Istanbul Turks I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with the Hagia Sophia and the red brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away. — Orhan Pamuk

The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word "orthodox," which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning "right opinion." These are books for which there is one and only one right reading; any other reading or interpretation is fraught with peril, from the loss of an "A" to the damnation of one's soul. This characteristic carries with it an obligation. The faithful reader of a canonical book is obliged to make sense out of it and to find it true in one or another sense of "true." If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy, or it may be his professor. In any case, he is obliged to accept the resolution of his problem that is offered him. He reads essentially without freedom; but in return for this he gains a kind of satisfaction that is possibly never obtained when reading other books. — Mortimer J. Adler

We have gone a long way toward civilization and religious tolerance, and we have a good example in this country. Here the many Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church do not seek to destroy one another in physical violence just because they do not interpret every verse of the Bible in exactly the same way. Here we now have the freedom of all religions, and I hope that never again will we have a repetition of religious bigotry, as we have had in certain periods of our own history. There is no room for that kind of foolishness here. — Harry S. Truman

The Crusaders come to one immediate decision. They decide that the Orthodox Greek Christians, the Georgian Christians, the Armenian Christians and the Jacobite Christians no longer could hold services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Only the Latin rite could be celebrated in Jerusalem. — Paul L. Williams

My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize. — Barbara Ehrenreich

More trade with Qatar & emirates is good against terrorism. — Rudy Giuliani

Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began. — Jeffrey Eugenides