Pagels Quotes & Sayings

The Secret Revelation of John opens, again, in crisis. The disciple John, grieving Jesus' death, is walking toward the temple when he meets a Pharisee who mocks him for having been deceived by a false messiah. These taunts echoed John's own fear and doubt. — Elaine Pagels

You're an original, an individual, a masterpiece. Celebrate that; don't let your uniqueness make you shy. Don't be someone other than the wonder you are. Every star is important to the sky. — Douglas Pagels

Really, I don't like to do any household chores. There was a time when I loved to cook, but that was when I wasn't writing books. — Elaine Pagels

By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil.
[...] By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth. — Elaine Pagels

The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God. — Elaine Pagels

Love is a feeling, the deepest and sweetest of all. It's incredibly strong and amazingly gentle at the very same time. — Douglas Pagels

The Gospel of Thomas claims to be the secret sayings of Jesus. There are 114 of them, so it says many things, but the central message is that Jesus is the one who reveals the divine light that brought the universe into being, and that you and I also reveal that light. — Elaine Pagels

Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time. — Leon M. Lederman

The Antichrist is often identified with the second beast in the Book of Revelation that arises from the land, the beast that tries to make everyone worship the power of evil. — Elaine Pagels

Gravity is the curvature of space. — Heinz R. Pagels

We use the word 'synoptic' to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means 'seeing together,' because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke - whoever wrote those Gospels - used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common. — Elaine Pagels

What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material. — Elaine Pagels

The Book of Revelation is all about the conflict, the contest between the forces of Good and Evil. — Elaine Pagels

ascetic practices. — Elaine Pagels

There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all. — Elaine Pagels

About the gnostic writers themselves and the setting in which they lived we know little, although gnostic Christians were influential enough to be denounced at length. — Elaine Pagels

Nature knows nothing of imperfection; imperfection is a human perception of nature. Inasmuch as we are part of nature we are also perfect; it is our humanity that is imperfect. And, ironically, because of our capacity for imperfection and error we are free beings - a freedom that no stone or animal can enjoy. Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless. The God that plays dice has set us free. — Heinz R. Pagels

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems. — Heinz Pagels

The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century. — Heinz Pagels

While we can prove that almost all numbers in the continuum are random, we cannot prove that any specific number is indeed random. — Heinz Pagels

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity. — Heinz Pagels

Science is expanding, and with it our vision of the universe. although this new and constantly changing view may not always give us comfort, it does have the virtue of truth according to our most effective resources for acquiring knowledge. No philosophy, moral outlook, or religion can be inconsistent with the findings of science and hope to endure among educated people. — Heinz Pagels

Possession of a program with unique analytic capabilities puts a scientist in as much of a priveleged position to make new discoveries as the possession of a powerful telescope. — Heinz Pagels

The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition. — Elaine Pagels

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine. — Heinz R. Pagels

The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there's no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel. — Elaine Pagels

Christians have ... identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan ... Nor have things improved since. The blood-soaked history of persecution, torture, murder, and destruction perpetrated in the name of religion is difficult to grasp, let alohne summarize, from the slaughter of Christians to the Crusades to the Inquisitiion to the Reformation to the European witchcraze to colonialization to today's bitter coflict in the Middle East. — Elaine Pagels

It is the winners who write history - their way. — Elaine Pagels

Jesus Christ rose from the grave.' With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical. — Elaine Pagels

So often, religion is identified in terms coined by Christianity as sets of belief. But I had the sense that it not only involves practice, but also emotion and levels of our experience that are almost precognitive. — Elaine Pagels

I got to thinking about the Book of Revelation that was written by a Jewish prophet who was also a follower of Jesus who hated the Roman Empire. I realized that the Book of Revelation could be a way to reflect on the issue of religion's relationship to politics. — Elaine Pagels

I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews. — Elaine Pagels

Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? ... these religious debates - questions of the nature of God, or of Christ - simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.' — Elaine Pagels

I am enormously susceptible to religious environments - the music, the liturgy and the prayers. — Elaine Pagels

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance, it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing. — Elaine Pagels

Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it. — Heinz R. Pagels

Your life can be what you want it to be ... You'll make it through whatever comes along. Within you are so many answers. Understand, have courage, be strong. — Douglas Pagels

The final story of randomness - utter chaos - has not yet been told to us by the mathematicians. It seems remarkable that something so fundamental for probability theory has not been defined and even more remarkable that we can go so far in mathematics lacking a definition. By simply assuming randomness exists, mathematicians assign elementary probabilities to events, and that is their starting point. But they have not captured chaos and looked it in the eye. — Heinz R. Pagels

No intelligent person, the sophisticated pagan might have explained, actually worshiped images of the gods, or worshiped living emperors; instead, the gods' images - and the images of the emperors themselves - provided an accessible focus for revering the cosmic forces they represented. — Elaine Pagels

The Romans weren't trying to kill all the Jews, but they did destroy Jewish resistance to Roman rule. Jerusalem was turned into a Roman army camp, and it was a total devastation. — Elaine Pagels

I an not saying that religious ideas are nothing but a cover for political motives [...]. Instead, I intend to show that religious insights and moral choices, in actual experience, coincide with practical ones. — Elaine Pagels

What would prevail in Christian tradition was not only the stark sayings of the gospels attributed to Jesus and the encouragements to celibacy that Paul urges upon believers in 1 Corinthians, but versions of these austere teachings modified to suit the purposes of the churches of the first and second centuries. — Elaine Pagels

Many of us have road maps we envision for the course we think our lives should take. It's important to get headed in the right direction, but don't get so caught up in the concerns over your destination that you forget to delight in the scenery of each new day. Remember that some of the secret joys of living are not found by rushing from point A to point B, but by inventing some imaginary letters along the way. — Douglas Pagels

In all of our days our lives are always changing, tears come along as well as smiles ... May you have rainbows after every storm, may you have hopes to keep you warm. And may you always have an angel by your side. — Douglas Pagels

Keep believing in brighter days, finding ways for your dreams and wishes to come true. Giving you hope that is as certain as the sun, giving you strength of serenity as your guide. — Douglas Pagels

The visible world is the invisible organization of energy. — Heinz Pagels

What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was. — Elaine Pagels

What's different about the Gospel of Thomas is that, instead of focusing entirely on who Jesus is and the wonderful works of Jesus, it focuses on how you and I can find the kingdom of God, or life in the presence of God. — Elaine Pagels

After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press. — Elaine Pagels

There was emptiness more profound than the void between the stars, for which there was no here and there and before and after, and yet out of that void the entire plenum of existence sprang forth. — Heinz Pagels

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. — Heinz R. Pagels

A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be. — Douglas Pagels

What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to. — Heinz Pagels

The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration. — Heinz Pagels

I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science. — Heinz R. Pagels

The great majority of Christians of the first few centuries did not advocate - and probably did not imagine - that such moral equality could be implemented in society. Most assumed, no doubt, that they could realize such moral equality only in the coming Kingdom of God. — Elaine Pagels

Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy? — Elaine Pagels

Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless. — Heinz R. Pagels

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church. — Elaine Pagels

There is a light within each person, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness. — Elaine Pagels

Along the road you travel, may the miles be a thousand times more lovely than lonely. — Douglas Pagels

Our capacity for fulfillment can come only through faith and feelings. But our capacity for survival must come from reason and knowledge. — Heinz Pagels

Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can. — Douglas Pagels

I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views. — Elaine Pagels

Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. — Heinz R. Pagels

[W]hat made Christians especially dangerous to the Roman order was their refusal to pay what Romans regarded as ordinary respect to their Roman rulers; and this brought some of them into direct and total opposition to the temporal as well as the divine authorities - to the emperors and to their divine patrons, the gods. — Elaine Pagels

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion. — Heinz Pagels

Orthodox theologians insisted that the rest of humankind were only transitory creatures, lost in sin - a view that would support what would become their dominant teaching about salvation, offered only through Christ, and, in particular, through the church they claimed to represent. — Elaine Pagels

People who study the way religions develop have shown that if you have a charismatic teacher, and you don't have an institution develop around that teacher within about a generation to transmit succession within the group, the movement just dies. — Elaine Pagels

These ancient stories in religion speak to our desire. But they move us toward hope. — Elaine Pagels

I am aware that I am less than some people prefer me to be, but most people are unaware that I am so much more than what they see. — Douglas Pagels

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years. — Elaine Pagels

Sometimes you just have to be patient and brave and strong. If you don't know how, just make it up as you go along. — Douglas Pagels

At the end of the day I'll go to a yoga class. I used to say that my work was my yoga, because it stretches everything, expands and challenges everything you know and understand and are. — Elaine Pagels

Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine husband or lover of any. — Elaine Pagels

Throughout the ages, Christians have adapted John of Patmos's visions to changing times, reading their own social, political and religious conflicts into the cosmic war he so powerfully evokes. Yet his Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear and desires for vengeance but also to hope. — Elaine Pagels

Once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him. — Elaine Pagels

Although the gospels of the New Testament
like those discovered at Nag Hammadi
are attributed to Jesus' followers, no one knows who actually wrote any of them. — Elaine Pagels

Don't scrutinize people with a microscope; view them from a comfortable distance. And allow some room for compassion in the space the lies between you. — Douglas Pagels

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. — Elaine Pagels

I want to speak! Fear restrains me. I have — Elaine Pagels

Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow. — Douglas Pagels

The prophets Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for example, often used the metaphors of adultery and prostitution to indict those they accused of being "unfaithful" to God's covenant. — Elaine Pagels

Fundamentalism does mean reading quite conservatively and literally, saying 'the Bible is the word of God and we have to follow it. What it says is this.' — Elaine Pagels

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

The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war. — Elaine Pagels

Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being. — Heinz Pagels

Uncertainty and Complementarity It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. — Heinz R. Pagels

It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them. — Heinz Pagels

I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion. — Elaine Pagels

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts. — Heinz R. Pagels

What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical. — Elaine Pagels

I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school teacher. — Elaine Pagels

A real magician makes no claim to violate physical laws; he only appears to do so. However, when pseudoscientists make claims to discover dramatic new phenomena, going beyond current physical theory, like telepathy or mental metal bending, then, like children, we must insist on seeing how the trick is done or as adults sit back and enjoy the entertainment. As — Heinz R. Pagels

The story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas gave a moral and religious rationale to anti-Jewish sentiment, and that's what made it persistent and vicious. — Elaine Pagels

I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I'd heard when I was growing up were simply made up - and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out. — Elaine Pagels

[W]hen the emperor Constantine abruptly changed Roman policy from one of persecuting Christians to protecting and favoring them with massive gifts of money, tax exemptions, and enormous prestige, the bishops, now in political favor, sometimes used these new resources to promote unanimity; thus in 381, the Christian emperor Theodosius made "heresy" a crime against the state. — Elaine Pagels

So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death. — Elaine Pagels

There's practically no religion that I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the others' choices. But in our century we're forced to think about a pluralistic world. — Elaine Pagels

[T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid. — Elaine Pagels