I am a creature of a day. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God. I want to know one thing: the way to heaven. God himself has condescended to teach me the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh, give me that book! At any price give me the book of God. Let me be a man of one book.--John WesleyNo man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. --George Bernard ShawThe Holy Book of the living God suffers more from its exponents today than from its opponents. -Leonard RavenhillIt will greatly help you to understand scripture if you note – no only what is spoken and written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goes before and what follows. --Miles Coverdale, in his introduction to his Bible translation.When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It is talking to me, and about me." --Soren KierkegaardWe do not read the Bible the way it is; we read it the way we are. --Evelyn UyemuraBible reading is an education in itself. --Lord TennysonReading the Bible without meditating on it is like trying to eat without swallowing. --AnonymousThe Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed. --Thomas PaineIt is not at all incredible, that a book which has been so long in the possession of mankind should contain many truths as yet undiscovered. -- Bishop ButlerIt is clear that there must be difficulties for us in a revelation such as the Bible. If someone were to hand me a book that was as simple to me as the multiplication table, and say, 'This is the Word of God. In it He has revealed His whole will and wisdom,' I would shake my head and say, 'I cannot believe it; that is too easy to be a perfect revelation of infinite wisdom.' There must be, in any complete revelation of God's mind and will and character and being, things hard for the beginner to understand; and the wisest and best of us are but beginners. --R.A. TorreyThe letter of Scripture is a veil just as much as it is a revelation; hiding while it reveals, and yet revealing while it hides.—Andrew JukesComing to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs. --Henry Ward BeecherThere is a way of reading the Bible that seems to leave God far away, off in the shadows somewhere. It is all information and technicalities and knowledge, but it feels like you're sitting with your back towards God. You come up against a difficulty or question, and you go to books, you ask pastors, friends, strangers on the internet, anyone but Him. Gradually God gets smaller and dimmer. --UnknownSome people like to read so many [Bible] chapters every day. I would not dissuade them from the practice, but I would rather lay my soul asoak in half a dozen verses all day than rinse my hand in several chapters. Oh, to be bathed in a text of Scripture, and to let it be sucked up in your very soul, till it saturates your heart! --Charles Haddon SpurgeonIn most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with "Thus saith the Lord". It is... not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite -- it excludes or repels -- the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force... It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long, except to those who go to it for something quite different. I predict that it will in the future be read, as it always has been read, almost exclusively by Christians. --C.S. LewisWe approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world.…It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us. –J.I. PackerThe Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian. --AW. TozerThe Bible is a harp with a thousand strings. Play on one to the exclusion of its relationship to the others, and you will develop discord. Play on all of them, keeping them in their places in the divine scale, and you will hear heavenly music all the time. --William P. WhiteFor some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year. If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant. --Martin LutherHere, then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to study God's Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy. --R. C. SproulOne of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed. --Leonard RavenhillThe scripture in times of disputes is like an open town in times of war, which serves in differently the occasions of both parties. --Alexander PopeEach epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook. -- Ludwig von MisesThe book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that. --MccoshMost people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. --Mark TwainThe Bible is the greatest example of the whole being greater that its parts. –Michael Phillips.Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer. --NapoleanThe Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed. --Patrick HenryLet mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in ever greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires, beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the gospels, it will not go.—GoetheWho decides what is right and wrong in the world? Who has the authority to define morality for all of creation? It is not the courts, congress, the media, public opinion, the "politically correct" police, the "tolerance" brigade or even the church. The only answer has been, is and always will be Jesus Christ. You can find His opinion on a great variety of subjects in His best seller... The Bible. --Jeffrey E. RameyYou may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God, and give it to the devil, if you do not desire to live according to it. -- Martin LutherThe word of God hidden in the heart is a stubborn voice to suppress.--Billy GrahamIt is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. --George WashingtonI am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this Book that you can by reason and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better man. It is the best Book which God has given to man. --Abraham LincolnI have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands. --Thomas Jefferson.So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year. --John Quincy AdamsIf there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the credit is due to my parents for instilling in me an early love of the Scriptures. --Daniel WebsterWhatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart. --John RuskinI am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount. --Martin LutherIf you believe that exposing your children to violence is a problem, by all means keep them away from the Bible. --Rev. Charles HendersonThe Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world. --Henry L. MenckenThe New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world. --Charles DickensThe Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home. --Thomas CarlyleSink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and still man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and guide would be gone; the same voyage to make, but his chart and compass would be overboard! --Henry Ward BeecherThe existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity. --Immanuel KantThe Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it. --Thomas HuxleyIt is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom. -- Horace GreeleyWhen the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. --Bishop Desmond TutuWe have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded. --Charles KingsleyThe Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation. --Elizabeth Cady StantonThe Bible itself is intolerant, and true followers of God's word should be as well.-- Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones UniversityToo often we see the Bible through whatever lens we get from our culture. --Brian McLarenHe who perverts Scripture is not the man who reduces this sacred poetry to its true meaning. Nay, that man perverts the Bible who hardens into dogmas the glowing metaphors of Eastern poetry. --Thomas AllinAny number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word about whales or apples. In the former case it refers to a fish, which might imply any sort of sea-monster; and in the second, to the essential experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of the tree, which is obviously more general and even more mystical . . . The things that look silly now are the first rationalistic explanations rather than the first religious or primitive outlines. If those original images had been left in their own natural mystery of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep, nobody would have quarrelled with them half so much . . . But it is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible.--G. K. ChestertonJust because the Bible says something doesn’t make it truth if what you are saying from the Bible is slanted, distorted, mis-applied, or merely the letter of the word. --J. Preston EbyOne of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious. --James I. PackerThe greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has stood so much bad preaching. --A.T. RobertsonThe devil can quote Scriptures and so can his ministers and they can quote them in perfect King James English. –Gary AmiraultWe must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations. ... --C. S. LewisSpouting scripture has no magic to dispel the devil. Scripture has phenomenal power but unless you submit your mind to its inerrant truth, its power is largely lost to you. --Martha KilpatrickThe one thing the New Testament forbids us to do is to treat it as a static document to be used as a set of proof-texts for instant solutions to complex and controversial contemporary problems. To misuse the New Testament in this way is to deny its dynamic character and to fail to realize that the Word has to be applied in a specific context. ...A static interpretation of the New Testament is dependent on a frozen Christology.--Karl Paul DonfriedThe Christian community continues to exist because the conclusions of the critical study of the Bible are largely withheld from them. --Hans ConzelmannThe inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it. --Robert Ingersoll
