Hosea Ballou Quotes

All Scripture is equally inspired, but not all Scripture is equally applicable or relevant to every stage of life.

Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.

Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty.

Even a little of dharma saves one from many a pitfall.

Today's reading was "if they ask you to walk a mile, walk two. Don't take an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth." You have chances every second to live this Word, but it has to be in you. It can't just be an idea; it has to sink from the mind into the heart.

You need not bring life to the scripture. You should draw life from the scripture.

I'm a Christian man that lives it every day, believing somebody will look and live by example.

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.

I like reading my bible, I like bible studies where I get together with others and talk about the word of God and how it relates to us and how we can change to become more like him.

I have to say that one of the most important things Scientology has given me is the ability to keep my integrity together. I understand how people can get into unethical situations, and Scientology has always helped me keep my head clear and be in present time.

Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.

When sermons start where people live - their questions, struggles, and concerns - and then offer a timely and helpful word from the Scriptures, people are more interested in hearing what else the Scriptures have to say.

The key is - I'll say the key - number one, I pray every day.

When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It is talking to me, and about me".

I hope nobody is seriously suggesting that we get our morals from scripture because if we did we'd be stoning people for working on the Sabbath or switching on a light on the Sabbath. So the point is that you can find good bits of the Bible but you have to cherry-pick, you have reject the nasty bits and pick the nice bits.

To gain the spiritual ascendancy over ourselves, and the influences with which we are surrounded, through a rigid course of self-discipline, is our first consideration, it is our first labor, before we can pave the way for our children to grow up without sin unto salvation.

When we pray for any virtue, we should cultivate the virtue as well as pray for it; the form of your prayer should be the rule of your life; every petition to God is a precept to man. Look not, therefore, upon your prayers as a method of good and salvation only, but as a perpetual monition of duty. By what we require of God we see what he requires of us.

I have a vision of the whole Church getting nearer to God by abiding by the precepts of the Book of Mormon.

Bible study without Bible experience is pointless.

Every morning, read seriously and reverently a portion of the Holy Scriptures, and acquaint yourselves with the history and doctrine thereof. It is a book full of light and wisdom, will make you wise to eternal life, and furnish you with directions and principles to guide and order your life safely and prudently.

Henri Nouwen once asked Mother Teresa for spiritual direction. Spend one hour each day in adoration of your Lord, she said, and never do anything you know is wrong. Follow this and you'll be fine.

I will now teach my son Increase (and others of my children) the way of raising a lesson out of every verse in his reading of the Bible; and of turning it into a Prayer; and engage him (and them) unto a daily Course in reading the Bible in such a way

The Bible will always be full of things you cannot understand, as long as you will not live according to those you can understand.

To give a man full knowledge of morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.

Scriptures were written, not to satisfy our curiosity and make us astronomers, but to lead us to God, and make us saints.