Parables Quotes - Page 3

Perhaps the highest goodness attainable is a life of service to all mankind. Such an ideal is supported in nearly every page in the Gospels-the parables, the sermons, and the countless acts of service by our Lord Himself. The ideal is not limited to any particular kind of service, nor a given quantity of service. The ideal is accepting life itself as a trust to be used in the welfare of mankind. It is a life that is glad for the chance to be of any help, an attitude that 'service is the rent we pay for our own room on earth.' (Lord Halifax)

Obert C. Tanner

Attitude, Rooms, Earth

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The parable of the prodigal son, the most beautiful fiction that ever was invented; our Saviour's speech to His disciples, with which He closed His earthly ministrations, full of the sublimest dignity and tenderest affection, surpass everything that I ever read; and like the spirit by which they were dictated, fly directly to the heart.

William Cowper

Bible, Beautiful, Heart

William Cowper (1862). “Letters of William Cowper; being a selection from his correspondence: with a sketch of his life, and biographical notices of his correspondents. [With a portrait.]”, p.54

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Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

A. A. Gill

Past, Fiction, Way

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If you hear an old parable and you don't believe it, it's mythology. If you hear an old parable and you believe it, it's religion.

Ray William Johnson

Believe, Mythology, Ifs

Twitter post from Apr 14, 2014

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In church I feel very close to the publican of the parable.

Giulio Andreotti

Church, Feels

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My favorite parable for living a positive and influential life is the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.

Tony Oller

Golden, Influential, Life Is

Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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My mom is very religious and she said, 'Whatever you think about all the time, that's what you worship.' If that's the case I'd like everyone to pop open their Diet Coke cans and turn to page 37 of their People Magazines. In this holy scripture, we read the parable of Ms. Valerie Bertinelli.

Maria Bamford

Mom, Religious, Thinking

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You talk to me in parables.
You may have known that I'm no wordy man,
Fine speeches are the instruments of knaves
Or fools that use them, when they want good sense;
But honesty
Needs no disguise nor ornament: be plain.

Thomas Otway

Honesty, Men, Needs

William Congreve, James Miller, Henry Fielding, David Garrick, Thomas Southern (1815). “The Mourning Bride. A Tragedy”

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When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don't try to write a parable or make a point.

Lauren DeStefano

Writing, Trying, Stories

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What I notice, as a historian reading stories about so-called nature miracles, the walking on the water, or the miraculous catch of fishes, they're done especially for the insiders, for the disciples. Usually healings and exorcisms are done for people along the road, as it were. Jesus doesn't come on the water to save the fishing fleet from Capernaum, he comes on the water to save the disciples. It's a parable, dummy, it's a parable, don't you get it? If the leadership of the church takes off in a boat without Jesus, it will sink, it will get nowhere.

John Dominic Crossan

Jesus, Reading, Healing

Source: www.abc.net.au

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For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.

Umberto Eco

Simple, Illustration, Cities

Umberto Eco (1995). “Name of the Rose”, p.215, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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People always got the image I was an anti-Christ or antireligion. I'm not. I'm a most religious fellow. I was brought up a Christian and I only now understand some of the things that Christ was saying in those parables. Because people got hooked on the teacher and missed the message. All this bit about electing a President. We pick our own daddy out of a dog pound of daddies.

John Lennon

Christian, Dog, Teacher

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I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.

Penelope Lively

Spring, Childhood, Church

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Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

Muriel Spark

Mind, Fiction, Facts

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No man can prophesy with another's parable.

Anna Julia Cooper

Men, Authenticity

Anna Julia Cooper, Charles C. Lemert, Esme Bhan (1998). “The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters”, p.135, Rowman & Littlefield

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Just as it is the province of science to find out what the facts of life are, to classify them and use them to verify or discredit whatever theory may have been advanced concerning them, so it is the province of a living theology to be constantly seeking from God the wit and wisdom that will interpret anew and more truly the parable of life.

Lily Dougall

Religion, Facts, Use

Burnett Hillman Streeter, Arthur Clutton-Brock, Cyril William Emmet, James Arthur Hadfield, Lily Dougall (1922). “Immortality: An Essay in Discovery, Co-ordinating Scientific, Psychical, and Biblical Research”

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When I consider all the circumstances detailed above respecting the Pans, I cannot help believing that, under the mythos, a doctrine or history of a sect is concealed. Cunti, the wife of Pandu (du or God, Pan), wife of the generative power, mother of the Pandavas or devas, daughter of Sura or Syra the Sun Pandæa only daughter of Cristna or the Sun Pandion, who had by Medea a son called Medus, the king of the Medes, who had a cousin, the famous Perseus surely all this is very mythological an historical parable!

Godfrey Higgins

Daughter, Mother, Cousin

Godfrey Higgins (1836). “Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis : Or, An Inquiry Into the Origin of Languages, Nations, and Religions”, p.439

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In His discourses, His miracles, His parables, His sufferings, His resurrection, He gradually raises the pedestal of His humanity before the world, but under a cover, until the shaft reaches from the grave to the heavens, whenHe lifts the curtain, and displays the figure of a man on a throne, for the worship of the universe; and clothing His church with His own power, He authorizes it to baptize and to preach remission of sins in His own name.

Edward Thomson

Men, Names, Heaven

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Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein.

Cormac McCarthy

Drama, Eye, Fire

"Suttree". Book by Cormac McCarthy (p. 4), May 1979.

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A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.

Nick Harkaway

Pie, Hot, Ephemeral

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If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

Peter Morgan

Distance, Events, Stories

"The Fifth Estate: When biopic subjects strike back" by Will Morley, www.bbc.com. October 21, 2014.

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No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

Richard Dawkins

Music, Moving, Doubt

Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.143, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

Matt Ridley

Sex, Writing, Differences

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.

Laura Mullen

Mother, Discovery, Matter

Source: therumpus.net

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And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is, you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving 'cause you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say, oh, look, a cow? Nobody.

Seth Godin

Obvious Things, Choices, Littles

"What Makes An Idea Go Viral?". Interview with Guy Raz, www.npr.org. March 4, 2016.

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