Profaned Quotes & Sayings

In waking to the strangeness of the world, many of us become strangers in our own homes. But home is where we start and where we shall someday return. The path between has been marked out for us by a Savior who became the prodigal from heaven, journeying into the far country to bring us home with Him. He is both the end of our exploring and its liberating transformation. It is Jesus who has already profaned the mysteries of God by making the unknown at the center known to us: he who has seen Jesus has seen the Father. — G.K. Chesterton

If old people be found in the way of righteousness, their age will be their honour. Old age, as such, is honourable, and commands respect (Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, Lev. 19:32); but, if it be found in the way of wickedness, its honour is forfeited, its crown profaned and laid in the dust, Isa. 65:20. Old people therefore, if they would preserve their honour, must still hold fast their integrity, and then their gray hairs are indeed a crown to them; they are worthy of double honour. Grace is the glory of old age. — Matthew Henry

For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree.
For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool's motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket. — Ernst Junger

For, since the fall of Adam had brought disgrace upon all his posterity, God restores those, whom He separates as His own, so that their condition may be better than that of all other nations. At the same time it must be remarked, that this grace of renewal is effaced in many who have afterwards profaned it — John Calvin

To share Eucharistic communion with someone unbaptized, or committed to another story or system, is odd - not because the sacrament is 'profaned', or because grace cannot be given to those outside the household, but because the symbolic integrity of the Eucharist depends upon its being celebrated by those who both commit themselves to the paradigm of Jesus' death and resurrection and acknowledge that their violence is violence offered to Jesus. All their betrayals are to be understood as betrayals of him; and through that understanding comes forgiveness and hope. Those who do not so understand themselves and their sin or their loss will not make the same identification of their victims with Jesus, nor will they necessarily understand their hope for their vocation in relation to him and his community. Their participation is thus anomalous: it is hard to see the meaning of what is being done. — Rowan Williams

To find that which is most sacred in this world, look to that which is most violently profaned. — Christopher West

It was unreal, grotesquely unreal, that morning skies which dawned so tenderly blue could be profaned with cannon smoke that hung over the town like low thunder clouds, that warm noontides filled with the piercing sweetness of massed honeysuckle and climbing roses could be so fearful, as shells screamed into the streets, bursting like the crack of doom, throwing iron splinters hundreds of yards, blowing people and animals to bits. — Margaret Mitchell

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. — Karl Marx

Beauty is a burden as well as a gift. Beauty puts other women on edge. It torments men. Man is born adoring beauty and carries, just below the surface, a predisposition, a gut feeling, that beauty should be profaned and destroyed. The first thing conquering armies do is burn the library and rape the virgins. — Chloe Thurlow

One of the psychological reasons why decent people shrink from vulgar sex discussion is because by its very nature it is not a communicable kind of knowledge ... It is too sacred to be profaned. — Fulton J. Sheen

Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign
Love was as subtly catched, as a disease;
But being got it is a treasure sweet,
Which to defend is harder than to get:
And ought not be profaned on either part,
For though 'tis got by chance,'tis kept by art — John Donne

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known. — Emil Cioran

None of us like the concept of law because none of us like the restraints it puts on us. But when we understand that God has given us his law to aid us in guarding our souls, we see that the law is for our fulfillment, not for our limitation. The law reminds us that some things, some experiences, some relationships are sacred. When everything has been profaned, it is not just my freedom that has been lost- the loss is everyone's. God gave us the law to remind us of the sacredness of life, and our created legal systems only serve to remind us of the profane judgments we make. — Ravi Zacharias

Even on the left, even in this age of exposed racial rifts, politicians still say with a straight face that this country was founded on principles of equality. Words mean things, we say again and again, but actions mean much more, and still as a nation, we worship the very slave owners who gave legal precedence to the notion of percentages of human beings. We scream equality and freedom while unabashedly modeling our action on the fathers of genocide. The only want to rationalize this most American of contradictions is to devalue the lives of the slaughtered, as was done then, so it must be now, and so apologists remind us that those were the times, and they didn't know better, and one and one. But if those lives matter now then they mattered then, and the clapback stretches through history, unraveling all the creation myths this country has always held most sacred, toppling our many false idols and cleaning out our profaned temples. — Daniel Jose Older

If we want to know what's most sacred in this world, all we need to do is look for what is most violently profaned. — Christopher West

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The — Karl Marx

That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. — Henry David Thoreau

The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains! — Mark Twain

Covenant of thy servant: thou hast profaned — Anonymous

Oh! my ministering brethren! Much of our praying is but giving God advice! Our praying is discolored with ambition, either for ourselves or for our denomination. Perish the thought! Our goal must be God alone. It is His honor that is sullied, His blessed Son who is ignored, His laws broken, His name profaned, His Book forgotten, His house made a circus of social efforts. — Leonard Ravenhill

Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned. — Emile Durkheim

I've been cursed for delving into the mysteries of life. Perhaps death is sacred, and I've profaned it. Oh, what a wonderful vision it was. I dreamed of being the first to give to the world the secret that God is so jealous of, the formula for life. Think of the power, to create a man. And I did, I did it, I created a man. And who knows, in time I could have trained him to do my will. I could have bred a race, I might even have found the secret of eternal life. — William Hurlbut

We must be people who love to work; we must love righteousness and walk before the Lord and not be defiled or profaned by evil — Sunday Adelaja

If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie's face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another. — Wilkie Collins

What are they doing here, these difficult young persons and their still more difficult guardians? This - this sacred Elysian garden of the great humanistic tradition of classic wisdom and classic art - must not be invaded by clamorous babes and agitated elders, must not be profaned either by the plaudits or the strictures of the unlettered mob. Somewhere in human life, and where should it be if not in the cloistered seclusion of noble literature? - there must be an escape from the importunities of such people and from the responsibilities of the ignorance they so jealously guard. — John Cowper Powys

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things. — Henry David Thoreau

Ladies and Gentlemen, we deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. No temple has ever been so profaned that it cannot be purified; no man is ever truly lost; no nation is irrevocably dishonored. Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. Khrushchev is not aware that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him. — William F. Buckley Jr.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language ... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was "it"? "It" was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless. — Elie Wiesel

A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death.. — Anton Chekhov

Without Christ, sciences in every department are vain ... The man who knows not God is vain, though he should be conversant with every branch of learning. Nay more, we may affirm this too with truth, that these choice gifts of God
expertness of mind, acuteness of judgment, liberal sciences, and acquaintance with languages, are in a manner profaned in every instance in which they fall to the lot of wicked men. — John Calvin

Actually, if you go back to what Marx said in The Communist Manifesto over a hundred years ago, when in talking about the constant revolutions in technology, he ended that paragraph by saying, "All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and men and women are forced to face with sober senses our conditions of life and our relations with our kind." We're at that sort of turning point in human history. — Grace Lee Boggs

And if it be true that the loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own, the work of art which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, which is not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakening the enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite, almost repulsive to the initiate.
This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were not growing blunted. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

He could not admit that he had known the truth then and was now mistaken, because as soon as he began to think calmly about it, the whole thing fell to pieces; nor could he admit that he had been mistaken then, because he cherished his state of soul at that time, and by admitting that it had been due to weakness he would have profaned those moments. — Leo Tolstoy