Presbyterian Quotes & Sayings

Eisenhower, in contrast, turned spirituality into spectacle. At a transition meeting with his cabinet nominees, he announced that they and their families were invited to a special religious service at National Presbyterian Church the morning of the inauguration. — Kevin M. Kruse

They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb ... — Frederick Buechner

Those who have been passed over in this world will be greatly honored and rewarded in heaven. ========== Mark 9.38-42 For or Against First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, Mississippi — Anonymous

What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over half a century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia (the city where Barnhouse pastored), all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am," and the churches would be full every Sunday ... where Christ was not preached. — Michael S. Horton

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do. — John Steinbeck

The temptation for a new generation, however, could be to see Baptist identity as a nuisance in the quest for converts. The effort to minimize an offensive "denominational brand name" will be counterproductive if we produce a generation of "anonymous Baptists," those whom we believe cannot handle the truth about Christ's design for His church. It will be tragic indeed if a future Broadman and Holman catalog includes a book titled, "Why I Am a Community Church (SBC) member."
But it will be equally tragic if the volume is titled, "Why I Want to Be a Presbyterian, but the Bible Won't Let Me. — Russell D. Moore

I was a Presbyterian minister at a small church in Omaha, Nebraska. — Sam Barry

However, ironically, I was baptized Presbyterian, and went to a Quaker school for twelve years. — Brian De Palma

Come here till I comb your hair, said Grandma. Look at that mop, it won't lie down. You didn't get that hair from my side of the family. That's that North of Ireland hair you got from your father. That's the kind of hair you see on Presbyterians. If your mother had married a proper decent Limerickman you wouldn't have this standing up, North of Ireland, Presbyterian hair. — Frank McCourt

The day of the march, we were forbidden to go to the march site. The man I worked for, the Presbyterian minister, knew we would want to be sort of martyrs for the cause and risk arrest. He didn't want any of that going on. So he made us stay in the neighborhood. — Sara Paretsky

I don't believe in predestination, even though I was raised a Presbyterian. — Shelley Long

The presbyterian way has ever appeared to me most agreeable to the word of God, and the reason and nature of things; — Jonathan Edwards

As you know, I am neither Roman Catholic, Protestant Episcopalian, nor Presbyterian, nor am I an Irishman. — John Bright

My father and I used to tussle about me becoming an actor. He's from strong, Presbyterian Scottish working-class stock, and he used to sit me down and say, 'You know, 99 percent of actors are out of work. You've been educated, so why do you want to spend your life pretending to be someone else when you could be your own man?' — Tom Hiddleston

If you pretend, that God rewarded Ahab or the Ninevites for worshipping their idols, you must prove that God is so far from being highly displeased with idolatry, as himself often declares, Deut. xxxii. 16, 17, 21, - 26. Judges ii. 14. 2 Kings xvii. 10, - 18. Psalm cvi. 19, - 40 Jer. xviii. 7, 35, l. 38, &c. - that he is ready to accept and reward the worship of idols, devils, bulls, dogs, cats, saints, leeks, onions, consecrated wafers, &c. if men be sincere in it. Rare doctrine this, for a Presbyterian clergyman, of this enlightened age! — John Brown Of Haddington

The Christian religion isn't an ideology, like socialism or libertarianism, tracked by self-identification. The Christian religion is a Body. A lot of people saying to a pollster that they identify as Christians hardly represents a movement. The question is, "Who goes to church?" And, congregationally speaking, Protestant liberalism is deader than Henry VIII. If adapting to the culture were the key to ecclesial success, then where are the Presbyterian Church (USA) church-planting movements, the Unitarian megachurches? — Russell D. Moore

What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything. — Mark Twain

My dad was a Presbyterian minister. Yes, I am one of those dreaded P.K.s - Preacher's Kids. Be afraid. — Libba Bray

There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, and was suspected of being a Deist and had talked of fighting a duel. — Abraham Lincoln

Along with the concept of American Dream runs the notion that every man and woman is entitled to an opinion and to one vote, no matter how ridiculous that opinion might be or how uninformed the vote. It could be that the Borderer Presbyterian tradition of "stand up and say your rightful piece" contributed to the American notion that our gut-level but uninformed opinions are some sort of unvarnished foundational political truths. I have been told that this is because we redneck working-class Scots Irish suffer from what psychiatrists call "no insight". Consequently, we will never agree with anyone outside our zone of ignorance because our belligerent Borderer pride insists on the right to be dangerously wrong about everything while telling those who are more educated to "bite my ass! — Joe Bageant

Lately ... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you. — June Jordan

What I often forget about students, especially undergraduates, is that surface appearances are misleading. Most of them are at base as conventional as Presbyterian deacons. — Muriel Beadle

Monstrosities of tall "monuments" and draped urns. One of the latter, the biggest and ugliest in the graveyard, was sacred to the memory of a certain Alec Davis who had been born a Methodist but had taken to himself a Presbyterian bride of the Douglas clan. She had made him turn Presbyterian and kept him toeing the Presbyterian mark all his life. But when he died she did not dare to doom him to a lonely grave in the Presbyterian graveyard over-harbour. His people were all buried in the Methodist cemetery; so Alec Davis went back to his own in death and his widow consoled herself by erecting a monument which cost more than any of the Methodists could afford. The Meredith children hated it, without just knowing why, but they loved the old, flat, bench-like stones with the tall grasses growing rankly about them. They made jolly seats for one thing. They were all sitting on one now. Jerry, tired of leap frog, was playing on — L.M. Montgomery

It didn't matter if it was the Catholic Church or Episcopal Church or Presbyterian Church and it still doesn't today. I just like the tradition of having a place to go and connect to a higher power and feel gratitude, and I think that's helpful however you find it. — Lisa Rinna

His Presbyterian minster father had believed in a divine design, and Mozasu believed that life was like this game where the player could adjust the dials yet also expect the uncertainty of factors he couldn't control. He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope. — Min Jin Lee

Peter, the biggest failure of them all, became the preacher that day. It was no homiletical masterpiece, to be sure. But people were deeply convicted - "cut to the heart," according to Acts 2:37 - by his anointed words. Three thousand were gathered into the church that day. Which church? Baptist? Presbyterian? Pentecostal? There were no such labels at that time - and in God's view of things, there still aren't. He ignores our categories. All he sees when he looks down is the body of Christ, made up of all born-again, blood-washed believers. The only subdivisions he sees are geographical - local churches. Other distinctions are immaterial. I — Jim Cymbala

Portraiture has its risks, and I suppose a dissident Free Presbyterian fatwa is one of them. — Alexander McCall Smith

The sixth and last eulogy was from Roderick, Hugo and Verna's oldest child. He wrote a three-page tribute to his father, and it was read by the reverend. Even Michael Geismar, a cold-blooded Presbyterian, finally succumbed to his emotions. The — John Grisham

My wife attends a Presbyterian church. — Pat Robertson

A red brick Presbyterian church ... captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net. — Barbara Ascher

If obedience is the chief thing good stood upon, why are not other laws and statutes urged as strictly as those which concern ceremonies? — George Gillespie

It can fairly be said of John Smith that he had all the virtues of a Scottish presbyterian, but none of the vices. — Menzies Campbell

They [muslims] are chopping off heads in Syria. Christianity is under siege. I'm Protestant, Presbyterian, and I'm proud of it. Other religions frankly are banding together, we need to band together. — Donald Trump

I grew up Presbyterian. Presbyterians thought the Methodists were wrong. Catholics thought all Protestants were wrong. The Jews thought the Christians were wrong. So, what I'm financing is humility. I want people to realize that you shouldn't think you know it all. — John Templeton

It's not about being a Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, or 5-Point Calvinist. God has only one family and, as Christians, we're in it! — Jim Cymbala

I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches, and I do this voluntarily. — Pete Seeger

I guess I'm like Grandfather Street was in his religion. He thought the Baptists were wonderful until he joined them and then the Presbyterians looked more interesting to him. After he'd been with them a while he couldn't see how anybody could be a Presbyterian, so he joined the Unitarians. People thought he was a turncoat, but he wasn't - he was just a sort of religious Mormon. One church wasn't enough for him. — Jarvis Hall

Paul points out that some say, 'I'm of Paul,' while others say, 'I'm of Apollos.' He asked, 'Isn't that carnal?' But what's the difference between saying that or saying, 'I'm a Baptist,' 'I'm a Presbyterian,' 'I'm a Methodist,' 'I'm a Catholic'? I have found that the more spiritual a person becomes, the less denominational he is. We should realize that we're all part of the Body of Christ and that there aren't any real divisions in the Body. We're all one. — Chuck Smith

When I'm in normal health, I'm a Presbyterian, but just now I feel that even the wicked get worse than they deserve. — Willa Cather

I'm Presbyterian and I don't go to church very much. — Joan Van Ark

I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience. — Sally Quinn

I would not be standing here today if my skin were white or my religion were Presbyterian. I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church. The ugliest things in this beautiful country of America are religious bigotry and racism. — Sun Myung Moon

Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student. — William, Saroyan

I'm spiritual. I'm religious. I'm a strong Christian and I'm a Catholic but I go to a Presbyterian Church. Occasionally I go to the Catholic church too. I take communion. I haven't transferred my membership or anything. — Wesley Clark

It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification. — Bruce McCall

PRESBYTERIAN, n. One who holds the conviction that the government authorities of the Church should be called presbyters. — Ambrose Bierce

Our gloomy Presbyterian ideas encourage fear of God, not love for him. — Daniel H. Hill

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church. — Billy Graham

Some very hungry people gathered to discuss how to distribute a small amount of food. It was understood that each church was supposed to take care of its own. The local Episcopal rector said, "My church, follow me." The Presbyterian minister said, "Mine, follow me." And the other denominations did the same. There were a lot of folks left. Then, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, stepped forward and said: "All of you who belong to nobody, you follow me. — Hal Brady

I can't say for sure where I was headed the first time my mom put a blue blazer on me. Church, probably. West Side Presbyterian in Ridgewood, New Jersey, specifically, where my blazer was paired with a clip-on tie and a pair of khakis for a Sunday morning with my fellow congregants. — Willie Geist

In fact, there are all sorts of great institutions and human enterprises that the Bible doesn't address or regulate. And so we are free to invent them and operate them in line with the general principles for human life that the Bible gives us. But marriage is different. As the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship says, God "established marriage for the welfare and happiness of humankind." Marriage did not evolve in the late Bronze Age as a way to determine property rights. At the climax of the Genesis account of creation we see God bringing a woman and a man together to unite them in marriage. The Bible begins with a wedding (of Adam and Eve) and ends in the book of Revelation with a wedding (of Christ and the church). Marriage is God's idea. — Timothy Keller

I went to a Presbyterian college, you know, I was in ... all the way, and so I remember doing my first sermon when I was 17, I was in high school. It wasn't a full twenty-five minute sermon, but for like ten minutes I got up and they let me do that, and it was on faith. — Woody Harrelson

It was a place of sin, loose women, whiskey and gambling. It was no place for a good Presbyterian, and I did not long remain one. — Mark Twain

I don't know much about the Presbyterian faith, but the atmosphere alone was enough to put me off predestination. — Sue Grafton

I wanted to be able to talk about my work at the dinner table and hold my head up on Sundays when my wife and I led our children into the Brentwood Presbyterian Church, where I was an elder. I did have a wild side, and I showed it every time I walked through the front door and my littlest child, Carrie Beth, made me dance to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass's hit song "Tijuana Sauerkraut. — Dick Van Dyke

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman. — Norman Maclean

This was the danger of sharing your dreams with your parents. If you told them you wanted to learn to play the guitar, all they heard you say was, "I want to learn to play the guitar," and then they found some practical, convenient, cheap way, often involving a church basement, for you to do it. But Hector had not come up with any plan of his own. And owning a guitar seemed like an important stepping stone on the way to being a guitar player. So he pawned his soul and said he would take the lessons from the Presbyterian youth minister. What the hell, he thought. Or heck, he thought. What the heck. — Lynne Rae Perkins

The Blue Hose of Presbyterian College and the Ichabods of Washburn University are perhaps the most amusing nicknames in collegiate sports; Blue Hose refers to stockings, not to melancholy courtesans. — Gregg Easterbrook

I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian and I knew how these things are done. I knew that in Biblical times if a man committed a sin the extermination of the whole surrounding nation-cattle and all-was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after. — Mark Twain

People are so shocked when they find ... out I am Protestant. I am Presbyterian. And I go to church, and I love God, and I love my church. — Donald Trump

I would say that grace is startling," Jean told me as he began retelling the story of how he wound up as pastor of Lagniappe Presbyterian Church, a growing congregation that meets in a glorified metal hangar in Bay St. Louis. "It's just startling. It isn't supposed to work. This wasn't supposed to work. — Cathleen Falsani

It was customary for the town's three churches - Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian - to unite and listen to one visiting minister, but occasionally when the churches could not agree on a preacher or his salary, each congregation held its own revival with an open invitation to all; sometimes, therefore, the populace was assured of three weeks' spiritual reawakening. Revival time was a time of war: — Harper Lee

His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of
Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William
Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief
rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist, anabaptist,
methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society
of friends. — James Joyce

My family was pious and Presbyterian mainly because my grandfather was pious and Presbyterian, but that was more of an inherited intuition than an actual fact. — Marilynne Robinson

Mormons can testify whether I am willing to lay down my life for a Mormon; If it has been demonstrated that I have been willing to die for a Mormon I am bold to declare before heaven that I am just as ready to die for a Presbyterian, a baptist or any other denomination. — Joseph Smith Jr.

I'm an equal opportunity reader - although I don't much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty. — Richard Ford

I'd grown up in a Presbyterian church, but I really didn't know Christ personally in my heart. I knew him, but I didn't know him. And there's a difference between an intellectual faith and a personal, heart faith in which I opened my heart to him and let him rule my life. — Billy Graham

It cannot be denied that as institutions, churches do good work. They operate schools and hospitals. Their charity outreaches, which take care of the homeless, sick, and hungry, have real impacts on communities. And while there are certainly hellfire-and-brimstone preachers around, there is counterweight in Presbyterian and Methodist ministers, who are grounded in a modicum of rationality, using Biblical stories as fables to teach psychological and ethical principles. — Gudjon Bergmann

I think of my body as a temple. Or at least a relatively well-managed Presbyterian youth center. — Emo Philips

I grew up Presbyterian, just a basic Protestant upbringing. There were years in my life when I would go to church every Sunday and to Sunday school. Then I just phased out of it. — Andy Dick

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church. — Margaret George

It is sufficient to say, what everybody knows to be true, that the Irish population is Catholic, and that the Protestants, whether of the Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church, or of both united, are a small minority of the Irish people. — John Bright

by a Scotch-Irish preacher, a Presbyterian named James Finley, in the year 1801, or before John Roebling was born. Finley had been a versatile and ingenious man. His "chain bridge" had a seventy-foot span, cost about six hundred dollars, and in the next ten years he built some forty more of them, including one over the Potomac above Washington. — David McCullough

I'm Ulster Presbyterian. We understand the need to work hard from an early age. — James Nesbitt

My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money. — James Green Somerville

Well, I'm a Christian. I was a born a Presbyterian and became an Episcopalian. — Karl Rove

Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs. — Sara Paretsky

I lit a candle in a Catholic church for the first time that afternoon. Me, a Presbyterian. I lit a candle in the warm, dark, waxy-smelling air of Saint Adelbert's. I put it beside the one that Mrs. Baker lit. I don't know what she prayed for, but I prayed that no atomic bomb would ever drop on Camillo Junior High or the Quaker meetinghouse or the old jail or Temple Emmanuel or Hicks Park or Saint Paul's Episcopal School or Saint Adelbert's. I prayed for Lieutenant Baker, missing in action somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam near Khesanh. I prayed for Danny Hupfer, sweating it out in Hebrew school right then. I prayed for my sister, driving in a yellow bug toward California - or maybe she was there already, trying to find herself. And I hoped that it was okay to pray for a bunch of things with one candle. — Gary D. Schmidt

If the Lowland farmer spoke with an uncouth accent, dressed in rags, lived in a miserable hovel, and fed on the same grain he fed his animals, it was not because he was a savage but because the relentless marauding of the English left him with very little choice. As for why he didn't simply cut his throat, the answer is that he was a Presbyterian and did not expect much in the way of earthly happiness. — William Maxwell

At Beth Israel there had been Acinetobacter baumannii, which was resistant to vancomycin. "That's how you know it's a hospital infection," I recall being told by a doctor I asked at Columbia Presbyterian. "If it's resistant to vanc it's hospital. Because vanc only gets used in hospital settings. — Joan Didion

Kate had attended a Presbyterian church with her family in Norfolk; she'd heard how the God of Moses could flip out and go pretty damn nuts when things didn't turn out His way. — Chet Williamson

In preparation for a career in academic medicine, I worked as a medical house officer at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital from 1966 to 1968 and then joined Ira Pastan's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health as a Clinical Associate. — Harold E. Varmus

But no parties could live under such labels as Petitioners and Abhorrers. Instead of naming themselves they named each other. The term "Whig" had described a sour, bigoted, canting, money-grubbing Scots Presbyterian. Irish Papist bandits ravaging estates and manor-houses had been called "Tories." Neither — Winston S. Churchill

That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. — Mark Twain

My mother was very, very Protestant. I grew up Presbyterian, and I went to church every Sunday until I was 18. I was forced to. — Rob Corddry

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother's father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts. — Rupert Murdoch

I was raised Presbyterian, but I'm not really going to church. I think the experience in meditation is pretty much where it's at for me. — David Lynch

One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley's Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville's First Presbyterian Church. — Peg Bracken

I'm a firm believer in God himself, but that's as far as I can go. I'm not any denomination. I'm not Catholic or Presbyterian or Baptist or Methodist or Jewish or Muslim. I'm none of those things. And I'm sure that's just fine with God. — Ray Charles

Burns had his faults, his frailties. He was intensely human. Still, I would rather appear at the "Judgment Seat" drunk, and be able to say that I was the author of "A man's a man for 'a that," than to be perfectly sober and admit that I had lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian. — Robert Green Ingersoll

We were good boys, good Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold. — Mark Twain

I was raised Catholic and I'm Presbyterian now, but I've always been a Christian, regardless of denomination. I believe that Jesus is the way. — Patricia Heaton

Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it. — Mark Twain

The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences. — John Frame

The light which we have gained, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitering of a bishop, and the removing hum from the Presbyterian shoulders that will make us a happy nation; no, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin have beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. — John Milton

Brought up a Presbyterian, indoctrinated from the Catechism, and being naturally of an inquiring mind, I fell a ready prey to the logic of infidelity, as soon as I began to think for myself. But that which at first threatened to be the utter shipwreck of faith in God and the Bible was, under God's providence, over-ruled for good, and merely wrecked my confidence in human creed and systems of Bible misinterpretations. — Charles Taze Russell

My early prose style - this is so embarrassing - was sort of a suburban, Presbyterian knockoff of Woody Allen. — John Hughes

New York is essentially a bazaar, not a Presbyterian church. — Pete Hamill

The first life insurance societies where formed in England in the years between 1692 and 1720. In America, life insurance became available to the clergy through the Presbyterian Ministers Fund, founded in 1759(still in existence), and the Episcopal Corporation, founded ten years later (subsequently merged). — Andrew Tobias

My father was a Saint Bernard, my mother was a Collie, but I am a Presbyterian. — Mark Twain