Quotes & Sayings About Pagans

Sometimes people ask me how I can be both a Catholic and a scientist, particularly a scientist who, at least for some research, studies evolution. I tell them that they are confusing us with Evangelicals. Catholics don't have anything against evolution. A literal interpretation of the Bible, the kind that says that the earth is six thousand years old, has never been a part of our religion, at least not since the Saint Augustine warned against preaching idiocy to Pagans in 415 AD. He said that if you tell people that they have to believe in things that they know are not true and that do not matter then they will never believe you when you tell them things that are true and that do matter, things about Christ and the resurrection. The Church's friendliness towards science is not to protect science. It is to protect Christianity. — Gina DeMarco

St. Francis knew the bear
to be born formless
licked into shape
by its mother.

So too
were pagans licked
into shape
by religion.

Bear with me
my love
what a conversion
it has been

To be
licked
into shape
by you. — Nancy Boutilier

I'm not a man so I do not have a heart that loves as a human does. I'm an immortal god that dwells with supreme power because I hold the keys to Death. But you are my existence. I am yours. — Abbi Glines

Upon moving to Cornwall in 1991, I became bewitched by its enchanting timeless beauty, which captured my heart and holds me still. Brooding and mysterious, the south-eastern edge of Bodmin Moor provided the wild backdrop against which the introduction to my magical training and love of nature began. — Carole Carlton

To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of. — John G. Jackson

Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have more fun than Christians. Let's scrape Horace's Dulche et utile off the plate before we even start the banquet. We're writing for fun, not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the jokes are.
All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.) — David Eddings

She shoved me against the wall, pulling a knife from her belt and pressing it against my throat. "Who are you?" she hissed.
I winced as the blade drew a line of blood on my flesh. I considered my options. Queen of the Fallen, no. Enemy to your children, no. "I'm Claire, the Devil's assistant," I answered, deciding on the simplest choice. — H.D. Smith

That love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you becomecommon. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery with chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands ... — Booker T. Washington

Often pagans, with their eyes wide open, do not see very clearly. — Georges Rouault

My work as a Meridian Psychotherapist and Clinical Hypnotherapist has taught me that people often feel guilty about the way they feel or think and many do not realise that seasonal changes can have a profound effect on the psyche. — Carole Carlton

With his nose in my hair, he inhaled deeply before putting a light kiss on my cheek. "Have you come to play?" he asked then kissed me again.
"No." I cringed when he drew my earlobe into his mouth. "I came to help you. That's all. I swear."
"I'd rather play. — H.D. Smith

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians. — George Monbiot

In the Bible, when God made a covenant with Abraham, He removed Abraham from the pagan world. The pagan system was such that if you were born poor, you were poor all of your life, and if you were born rich, you were rich all of your life.
However, in their covenant, God said to Abraham, "You are going to increase and prosper." This became the blessing, the rare and dramatic change that took place in Abraham's lifetime, making Abraham different from the pagans. The pagans did not understand prosperity. They lived from hand to mouth and knew no other way of life. — Celso Cukierkorn

People came into the Church in the Roman Empire because the Church was so good-Catholics were so good to one another, and they were so good to pagans, too. High-pressure evangelization strikes me as an attempt to deprive people of their freedom of choice. — Andrew Greeley

Like the pagans of old, unaffected by climate, the British were now dancing around a giant phallus. Unlike the pagans theirs was a sterile phallus, disarmed by condoms and pills - the first heathen sexual cult to be based around sterility rather than fertility. — Peter Hitchens

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible. — John Trudell

The police move around again, and the crowd gets just quiet enough so that we can hear the guy holding the sign calling Pagans Athiests say, "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." Mom pops up out of her seat, turns in that direction and shouts, "Professing themselves to be Christians, they commit violence. — Robin Reardon

The main thing these books have in common is their intent to help you live your best possible magickal and mundane life. We all walk very different paths as Pagans and Witches, and what is right for one person won't be right for the next. But my aim is to make it easier for you to find and follow the path that is right for you, integrating spirit and magick and heart into your everyday tasks as you walk it. — Deborah Blake

I pulled Thanos in for a kiss, surprising him. I wasn't sure if it was our bond or the fear this might be my last kiss, but I didn't hold anything back. I let him in. He took full advantage, plundering my mouth as if I were the last woman on Earth, which could have been a result of him being trapped in a desolate wasteland for the last five hundred years - but I decided not to overthink it. — H.D. Smith

In 325 A.D., the Roman Emperor Constantine decided to unify Rome under a single religion ... Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity. By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties. — Dan Brown

Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be. — G. E. M. Anscombe

And Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. — Herman Melville

I would like to invite you to savour every moment of this experiential journey. Feel the energies of the earth, listen to them calling on the wind, whispering their secrets and beckoning you to explore their mysteries. — Carole Carlton

I must complete my quest or I will die. — H.D. Smith

In Paul's view a church should not merely survive in its unfriendly pagan environment, but advance. Christians should have nothing to do with a sad acceptance of harsh surroundings, bearing heavy crosses with uncomplaining gloom, cultivating an oppressive sense of sin. They were to be positive, doing good to one another and to unbelieving Jews and pagans regardless of abuse or injury. "Rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks." No matter how adverse the circumstances, their way of life should be a rebuke to foulness and a spur to their neighbors to seek for themselves this new, extraordinary existence; Christians must outlove, outjoy, outthink, and always welcome those who opposed them. — John Charles Pollock

It also happens to me that when I meet a clericalist, I suddenly become anti-clerical. Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity. St. Paul, who was the first to speak to the Gentiles, the pagans, to believers in other religions, was the first to teach us that. — Pope Francis

I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion ... I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste. — Georges Bizet

In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome. — Will Durant

We act like pagans in a crisis - only one out of an entire crowd is daring enough to invest his faith in the character of God. — Oswald Chambers

Above all, we new pagans must learn to know and honor the Many as they manifest in our own time and place. While the ways of the ancestors - the Received Tradition - must always inform our thought and action, we are truest to our heritage when we think and act as natives of here and now. Our mandate is to be the pagans for our own time, our own place, our own post-modern, science-driven Western culture. This is the only kind of pagan that we can honestly be; anything else is pretense." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User's Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism — John Halstead

The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth. — Blaise Pascal

FIRST CIRCLE. Here they find the VIRTUOUS PAGANS. They were born without the light of Christ's revelation, and, therefore, they cannot come into the light of God, but they are not tormented. Their only pain is that they have no hope. — Dante Alighieri

Then each of you will control his own body and live in holiness and honor- not in lustful passion like the pagans who do not know God and his ways. — Paul The Apostle

Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give each other protection. News of this extraordinary new 'supertribe' spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah. — Karen Armstrong

The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals. The Jupiter of the Pagans is a lascivious monster. The Moloch of the Phoenicians is a cannibal. The pure mind of the Christians resolved, in order to appease his fury, to crucify his own son. The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite. — Baron D'Holbach

Pagans were wiser then paganism; that is why the pagans became Christians. — G.K. Chesterton

Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself. — Douglas Wilson

Mythology didn't cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology. — Thomm Quackenbush

Listen,' she whispered and pointed towards the window. 'Whenever the wind blows from the east and the wind chimes dance in the moonlight, there is magic in the air. — Carole Carlton

I couldn't just start killing people. That wasn't really my thing. — H.D. Smith

Let us not fool ourselves - without Christianity, without Christian education, without the principles of Christ inculcated into young life, we are simply rearing pagans. — Peter Marshall

It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance. — Paul Tillich

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land. — Noam Chomsky

Most Pagans are in agreement, treat yourself, others, animals and nature with respect. Just like many other religions the Pagan belief system often incorporates a desire to be a good person, kind, and understanding. There is no spread of hatred or violence. — Ginger Valentine

There,' said Wednesday, 'is one who "does not have the faith and will not have the fun". Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers-by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let's see - I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don't know you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favour here - this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets. — Neil Gaiman

The Quran says, "There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256), and in most periods of Islamic history there was no forced conversion of the "People of the Book." In fact, forced conversion is an affront to God and the dignity of the human conscience created by Him. Arabia at the time of the Quranic revelation was an exception. There the pagan Arabs who practiced a most crass form of polytheism were given the choice of either becoming Muslims or battling against them. It was very similar to the choice offered by Christian to European "pagans" once Christianity gained power on that continent. But even in Arabia, the Jews and Christians were not forced to become Muslims. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

No one returns from Christianity to the same state he was before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which pagans possessed. — C.S. Lewis

There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses. — Steve Allen

Tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?'
'Worship?'
'That's right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray to at dawn and at dusk?'
'The female principle. It's an empowerment thing. You know.'
'Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?'
'She's the goddess within us all. She doesn't need a name.'
'Ah,' said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, 'so do you hold mighty bacchanals in her honour? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon, while scarlet candles burn in silver candle holders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstactically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards? — Neil Gaiman

The knights were disgusted. They said that all that fiddle-faddle was well enough for saints, or might have been a thousand years ago, but the Lord Jesus would certainly be the first to command Christians to kill pagans. Rumon announced that he did not think so. — Anya Seton

These blasphemous thoughts were such as stirred up questions in me against the very being of God, and of His only beloved Son: As, whether there were in truth, a God or Christ? And whether the holy scriptures were not rather a fable, and cunning story, than the holy and pure word of God? 97. The tempter would also much assault me with this, How can you tell but that the Turks had as good scriptures to prove their Mahomet the Saviour, as we have to prove our Jesus is? And, could I think, that so many ten thousands, in so many countries and kingdoms, should be without the knowledge of the right way to heaven, (if there were indeed a heaven); and that we only, who live in a corner of the earth, should alone be blessed therewith? Every one doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors, and Pagans; and how if all our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too? — John Bunyan

We are pagans. We deify each other. — Lara Biyuts

At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, I'd say that pagans have about the same experience of otherness and isolation as anyone else. We're not special in that regard. But this is because the problem of loneliness is almost universal - and that, to my mind, makes it much more serious. — Brendan Myers

Jesus's gospel is not about a cosmic religious apocalypse upon rebellious pagans. His gospel is about a new messianic kingdom where He rules in the spirit of His Father, a kingdom full of joy, grace, freedom, and release from all that ails humanity. — Hugh Halter

Christians have oppressed Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Pagans, and each other throughout their centuries of power, preaching religious intolerance as the word of Jehovah whenever they had the military, political, or economic power to make it stick - and then piously preaching brotherhood, peace, and toleration when they didn't. — Isaac Bonewits

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Symbols are important. The Christians followed the pagans there, carving and painting their one God as the old ones carved and painted the many. Neither understand that the one is part of the many, the many part of the one. — Nora Roberts

Some religions, such as Catholicism, fully endorsed slavery, as Pope Nicholas V made clear when, in 1452, he issued the radically proslavery document Dum Diversas. This was a papal bull granting Catholic countries such as Spain and Portugal "full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property ... and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery."10 These last few words - to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery - sound not just sinister to us, but also psychotic. They make perfect sense, however, in a Christian context, given that the Bible is itself a heedlessly proslavery tome. — Michael Shermer

Jerry Falwell said that the reason that September 11th happened, the reason that God allowed it to happen, was because of certain people in our country. People like, and I'm quoting, 'the pagans,' which is a motorcycle group. Feminists; he brought up feminists. [ ... ] And I couldn't believe it, he said that God had actually talked to him and said, these were the people. That was the reason. It was those people, and that was the reason God allowed this to happen. And I thought, 'That's odd.' Because God had called me twelve hours before, and He said the reason He was upset was because of people like Jerry Falwell. — Lewis Black

I eyed the sheriff. "So I better be breathing when He finds me." "Who the hell are you talking about?" the sheriff blurted.
I chuckled.
The postman sneered at the sheriff. "She means the Demon King. The Devil. This is a phone from Hell - the real one. — H.D. Smith

But it was not merely the pagans who made this connection of heavenly physical bodies with heavenly spiritual powers. The Old Testament itself equates the sun, moon, and stars with the angelic "sons of God" who surround God's throne, calling them both the "host of heaven" (Deut. 4:19; 32:8-9).[10] Jewish commentator Jeffrey Tigay writes, "[These passages] seem to reflect a Biblical view that ... as punishment for man's repeated spurning of His authority in primordial times (Gen. 3-11), God deprived mankind at large of true knowledge of Himself and ordained that it should worship idols and subordinate celestial beings."[11] — Brian Godawa

Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history. — Brendan Myers

Sometimes, when I tell folk my story, they ask why I did not run away from the pagans, why I did not escape southward into the lands where the Danes did not yet rule, but it never occurred to me to try. I was happy, I was alive, I was with Ragnar, and it was enough. — Bernard Cornwell

Other prophets, other messiahs, came and went in Jesus' day. Routinely, they died violently at the hands of the pagan enemy. Their movements either died with them, sometimes literally, or transformed themselves into a new movement around a new leader. Jesus' movement did neither. Within days of his execution it found a new lease of life; within weeks it was announcing that he was indeed the messiah; within a year or two it was proclaiming him to pagans as their rightful Lord. How can a historian explain this astonishing transformation? — Marcus J. Borg

It is always much more difficult for Christians to detect a fundamentally sinful attitude in other Christians than in pagans - especially if that attitude is endemic to contemporary society, thereby reducing or eliminating the "shock" force of that sin. — D. A. Carson

Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence make us complicit. — Thomm Quackenbush

The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man. — Fernando Pessoa

If we look back in history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find a few that have not in their turns been persecutors and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practised it upon the Puritans. They found it wrong in Bishops, but fell into the practice themselves both there (England) and New England. — Benjamin Franklin

Everyone has the right to believe whatever he or she wants. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Pagans, atheitsts, and every other religion. People can follow whichever they choose. Even if you and I believe Christianity is the truth, we must allow others to choose their own beliefs. You can't force anyone to believe something they don't, anyway. — Michael Monroe

To put it plainly, women enjoyed higher status and more autonomy among Christians than among pagans, and could expect better treatment from their husbands. Pagan Roman women were "three times as likely as Christians to have married before age 13," according to the sociologist Rodney Stark.3 Christian women also exercised far more choice in whom they wed, and were less likely to be forced into an abortion (a frequent cause of death for women of the time). — Vincent Carroll

They were nothing more than modern day pagan worshippers. Congregants of a religion built on greed and hedonism. The trading floor served as their shrine; the phones as their Holy Grail; and the clients as the prophets who would entitle them to choose between putting the next down payment on a Lamborghini or a Mercedes — Soroosh Shahrivar

You came here of your own free will, Claire. I won't be denied. You're mine now, and I intend to keep you. — H.D. Smith

The cities, which had been the bearers of culture, were especially hard hit; substantial citizens, in large numbers, fled to escape the tax-collector. It was not till after the death of Plotinus that order was re-established and the Empire temporarily saved by the vigorous measures of Diocletian and Constantine. Of all this there is no mention in the works of Plotinus. He turned aside from the spectacle of ruin and misery in the actual world, to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty. In this he was in harmony with all the most serious men of his age. To all of them, Christians and pagans alike, the world of practical affairs seemed to offer no hope, and only the Other World seemed worthy of allegiance. To the Christian, the Other World was the Kingdom of — Bertrand Russell

Paganism is more of an attitude of mind than a fixed creed. It is always tempting to ask, "what do Pagans believe?" but a better question is "what do Pagans do? — Yvonne Aburrow

I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America ... I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen. — Jerry Falwell

We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. — G.K. Chesterton

When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans. MATTHEW 6:7 NIV — Billy Graham

I flinched when his hands lifted, although it was more of a reaction to everything that had been happening to me, not necessarily because he was Death. He stilled. "You're sad," he said. "Let me help you."
"There isn't anything you can do."
"I can comfort you. — H.D. Smith

There are a few people who are, let's say, personality-challenged, who would like to set up a cult, but in large part they fail due to the innate stroppiness and independence of their fellow pagans. — Liz Williams

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members. — Elaine Pagels

I think that's shameful, even if it's just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil ... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It's shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward. — Gregory Maguire

Our problem in America is not with atheists or the pagans who are consistent with their unbelief, but with believers who are inconsistent with their belief. — Randall Terry

Abortion is without a doubt one of the greatest moral evils within modernity. As the "Advocate of Christian Memory," a pope must take up the mantle of defending the culture of life - a defense the Early Church held against the pagans of Rome. — Pope Francis

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.
[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772] — Benjamin Franklin

It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The blue of winter, the brown of spring, the red of summer, and the fall of green. I seek the place of treasures past. I seek the truth of sand and glass. I call to the wind of seasons past. I bring with me the best of summer. I am the one with whom you bask. Deliver me and complete your task. — H.D. Smith

When Abbess Ebba received tidings of the near approach of the pagan hordes, who had already wrecked vengeance upon ecclesiastics, monks, and consecrated virgins, she summoned her nuns to Chapter, and in a moving discourse exhorted them to preserve at any cost the treasure of their chastity. Then seizing a razor, and calling upon her daughters to follow her heroic example, she mutilated her face in order to inspire the barbarian invaders with horror at the sight. The nuns without exception courageously followed the example of their abbess. When the Danes broke into the cloister and saw the nuns with faces thus disfigured, they fled in panic. Their leaders, burning with rage, sent back some of their number to set fire to the monastery, and thus the heroic martyrs perished in the common ruin of their house. — Michael Barrett

The Hegelian babble about the real being the true is therefore the same kind of confusion as when people assume that the words and actions of a poet's dramatic characters are the poet's own. We must, however, hold fast to the belief that when God - so to speak - decides to write a play, he does not do it simply in order to pass the time, as the pagans thought. No, no: indeed, the utterly serious point here is that loving and being loved is God's passion. It is almost - infinite love! - as if he is bound to this passion, almost as if it were a weakness on his part; whereas in fact it is his strength, his almighty love: and in that respect his love is subject to no alteration of any kind. There — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ. — Desmond Tutu

These Greek-speaking city folk were no country bumpkins, like those they called pagans - pagani - a term meaning "rustics" or "hicks."18 They inhabited one of the liveliest, most urbane, and culturally diverse regions on earth. Many could read and write; the early Christians, like the Jews, considered themselves People of the Book and prized the ability to read Scripture. — Richard E. Rubenstein

I want to be where there are out and out pagans. — Francis Xavier

Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred. — Thomm Quackenbush

It appears an extraordinary thing to me, that since there is such a diabolical spirit in the depravity of human nature, as persecution for difference of opinion in religious tenets, there never happened to be any inquisition, any auto da fe, any crusade, among the Pagans. — Laurence Sterne

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family. — G.K. Chesterton

Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Cicero, just to name a few, all lived in pagan societies. Some of the greatest political and military leaders of all time, such as Alexander the Great, Pericles of Athens, Hannibal of Carthage, and Julius Caesar of Rome, were all pagans, or else living in a pagan society. — Brendan Myers

bread were being baked, or gold or silver purified in a furnace." Afterwards the Christians of Smyrna wish to collect his remains, desiring "to have a share in his holy flesh." Before they are allowed to do so, they have to overcome the objections of pagans and — Robert Bartlett

I'd like to say it could have been worse. I'm sure lots of people hate their job, or their boss, or the people they work with. I just couldn't relate to those people. They have options. They can quit their job, move out of town, or drop off the grid. The only option I had was a guaranteed one-way ticket to Hell when I died, and that didn't include dental. — H.D. Smith

I would have so loved to learn about the Vikings."
Lillian snorted. "Since when have you been interested in warlike pagans with silly-looking headgear?"
Daisy looked up from her book again. "Are we talking about Grandmother again? — Lisa Kleypas

The notion of a crucified Lord was a scandal to the first-century world. Crucifixion was a public form of execution, and its cruelty was well known. For Jews, death by crucifixion meant that a person was under the curse of God, while pagans protested that it was sheer madness.502 To associate God with the world of suffering was therefore utterly inappropriate. But in spite of the offensive nature of Jesus' suffering and death, that is precisely the way God has worked, and Hebrews gives it a central place. It was fitting503 that God should effect his glorious saving purposes through Christ's sufferings.504 — Peter T. O'Brien