Top 100 Quotes About Heresy
#1. Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.
Terence McKenna
#2. If these men worshipped anything, they worshipped magic, which she supposed would be heresy back in Grey London. But then again, Christians worshipped an old man in the sky, and if Lila had to say which one seemed more real at the moment, she'd have to side with magic.
Victoria Schwab
#3. Some Christians believe the harder that one thinks, the colder faith will grow. Augustine grew more brilliant as he grew more pious, more creative as he became more orthodox. His period of heresy was imitative, but his traditional Christianity took mental risks.
John Mark Reynolds
#4. Lovers think they are looking for each other, but there is only one search: wandering This world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here there is no dogma and no heresy.
Rumi
#5. We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.
Baron De Montesquieu
#6. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
Elie Wiesel
#7. The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco
#8. In every age the church is threatened by heresy, and heresy is bound up in false doctrine. It is the desire of all heretics to minimize the importance of doctrine. When doctrine is minimized, heresy can exercise itself without restraint.
R.C. Sproul
#9. There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of the timing.
Norman Rush
#10. The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#11. Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.
J.I. Packer
#12. Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.
Carl R. Trueman
#13. In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.
Storm Jameson
#14. Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#15. What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.
John Ruskin
#16. The word 'monster' [monstrum] derives from 'demonstrare,' meaning to show or to demonstrate. Heresy and evolutionary change are thus mere intrusions into a homogenous perception of reality. My vocation, I decided, would be to make my life an example.
But of what?
Steve Abbott
#17. I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
G.K. Chesterton
#18. Ignorance of Scripture is the root of every error in religion, and the source of ever heresy. To be allowed to remove a few grains of ignorance, and to throw a few rays of light on God's precious word, is, in my opinion, the greatest honor that can be put on a Christian.
J.C. Ryle
#19. Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subsequent writings.
Bill Bryson
#20. Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.
Joseph Campbell
#21. The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech ... For true poetry is never speech but always a song.
Herbert Read
#22. Ignorance is the Mother not of Devotion, but of Heresy.
Cotton Mather
#23. In reality, orthodoxy comes into being only after there are choices to be made, with competing, and mutually exclusive, options. Heresy is the choice that loses. Ecclesiastical history, like any other, is written by the victors.
Eric A. Eliason
#24. As with all priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.
Frank Herbert
#25. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#26. All energy contains consciousness. That one sentence is basically scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world.
Seth
#27. To claim that wines should not be changed is a heresy; the palate becomes saturated and after the third glass the best of wines arouses nothing but an obscure sensation.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
#28. O heresy in fair, fit for these days,
A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise.
William Shakespeare
#29. The purely righteous do not complain of the dark, but increase the light; they do not complain of evil, but increase justice; they do not complain of heresy, but increase faith; they do not complain of ignorance, but increase wisdom.
Abraham Isaac Kook
#30. Jane Austin was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it.
Charlotte Bronte
#31. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Lord Acton
#32. For as a surfeit of the sweetest things The deepest loathing to the stomach brings, Or as tie heresies that men do leave Are hated most of those they did deceive, So thou, my surfeit and my heresy, Of all be hated, but the most of me!
William Shakespeare
#33. There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
James Joyce
#34. Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.
George Orwell
#35. I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#36. I would say much of religious heresy is the result of a misunderstanding of the basic nature of God. And once we have a proper understanding of God, then usually most of the areas of our life coincide with who God is and what He desires for each one of us.
Josh McDowell
#37. According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy, he is given the choice between repentance and punishment.
Naguib Mahfouz
#38. Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.
Pope Leo XIII
#39. The most damnable and pernicious heresy that has ever plagued the mind of man was the idea that somehow he could make himself good enough to deserve to live with an all-holy God.
Martin Luther
#41. Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.
Andre Suares
#42. You can preach heresy at a lot of churches, and people will not object. Leaders can lead double lives, and people will let it be. But, change the order of service, and it's time for a fight.
Ed Stetzer
#43. All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a 'heresy' which must be rooted out.
Lu Xun
#44. A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.
Conrad Black
#46. Christianity is the heresy of heresies, the underlying cause of the weakness, lethargy, sickness, and failure of the modern church.
Peter J. Leithart
#47. Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.
Blaise Pascal
#48. All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.
George Bernard Shaw
#49. I became convinced that the whole essence of the computer revolution is interactivity. That was very early in my career. At the time I did that it was heresy.
Chris Crawford
#50. There is no society that protects freedom of religion more than secular democracies, because in societies where one religion rules, different viewpoints will be labelled as heresy and blasphemy. Why? Because the society is built on religion - not freedom for all points of view.
Flemming Rose
#51. People said - though this felt like a heresy - that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.
Hilary Mantel
#53. It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.
Erica Jong
#54. I think I came here as a priest ... The priest is more concerned with heresy than with sin; sins can be forgiven; heresy must be eliminated.
Samuel Bowers
#55. A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
G.K. Chesterton
#56. The testament of science is so continually in a flux that the heresy of yesterday is the gospel of today and the fundamentalism of tomorrow.
Edward Kasner
#57. [Heresy is] the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.
Hilaire Belloc
#58. There is a very simple reason why Lion El'Jonson did not take part in the final battles of the Horus Heresy. It is beautifully simple, when you consider it. He was waiting.'
'Waiting for what?' Boreas asked quietly.
'He was waiting to see which side won, of course.
Gav Thorpe
#59. Heresy is a word which, when it is used without passion, signifies a private opinion. So the different sects of the old philosophers, Academians, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, &c., were called heresies.
Thomas Hobbes
#61. We are prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.
Carl Sagan
#62. I say, if you hate cruelty, remember that nothing is so cruel in its consequences as the toleration of heresy!
George Bernard Shaw
#63. Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.
John C. Polanyi
#64. Heresy no longer existed within religion; it
was founded in the state.
Reinhart Koselleck
#65. We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sound like heresy or plots.
Brooks Atkinson
#66. [E]very heresy is due to an overemphasis upon some truth, without allowing other truths to qualify and balance it.
John R.W. Stott
#67. In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.
John Shelby Spong
#68. But there is yet another form of this hidden heresy, and, paradoxically, it can affect those who are proudest of their long-standing and unimpeachable orthodoxy; heresy in the form of indifference.
Karl Rahner
#69. I prefer that these reserves be spent in arguing whether Mary conceived without sin, whether Christ was God or man, rather than discussing whether my power is of divine origin and if, in short, I am deserving of it. Heresy, then, is tolerable as long as it is not employed directly against power.
Carlos Fuentes
#70. There are people who think I'm a Bolshevik, and this is all a major distraction at best and heresy at worst. But I really don't care.
William Clay Ford Jr.
#71. In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
Learned Hand
#72. There is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions ... The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy.
John Stuart Mill
#73. When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves," said Lothar of Saxony, "heresy grows in the garden of the Church.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#74. They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly ... Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit ...
Galileo Galilei
#75. O God and Lord, now the council condemns even Your own act and Your own law as heresy, since You Yourself did lay Your cause before Your Father as the just judge, as an example for us, whenever we are sorely oppressed.
Jan Hus
#76. The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Helen Keller
#77. Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.
Harold Bloom
#78. Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo.
Maajid Nawaz
#79. It follows from the assumption of a universally valid ideology, just as night follows day, that other positions are heresy.
Paul Watzlawick
#80. Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
#81. If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.
Charles Bradlaugh
#82. It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.
Walter Lippmann
#83. The sole heresy has become the view that there is such a thing as heresy.
D. A. Carson
#84. The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.
Rob Bell
#85. By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.
Desiderius Erasmus
#87. A reader has recently described the Heresy novels as "Dan Brown meets Guy Ritchie" and "I am constantly telling people about the awesome movie I'm watching, and then correct myself. Book. Book that I'm reading.
Alexander Ferrar
#88. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#89. When the state executes a member of the human family, it declares that person worthless, without possibility of redemption. As Christians, we believe this is a heresy, a denial that each human being is created in God's own image.
Doug Davidson
#90. Heresy," by the way, simply means "choice." It came to mean "thoughtcrime," implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.
Robert M. Price
#92. With Metavoid, I wanted to move forward with the Lustmord sound, rather than recreating past works such as Heresy or Black Stars, I wanted to create a sound that was new, but which was also unmistakably Lustmord. It's for others to decide if I failed or succeeded.
Brian Williams
#93. Science is the most reliable guide for civilization, for life, for success in the world. Searching a guide other than the science is meaning carelessness, ignorance and heresy.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
#94. It was a very stupid mistake to think you could deal with heresy by burning heretics. It's the very same mistake that modernist Catholics are making today in reverse. They think you can love heretics by loving heresies.
Peter Kreeft
#95. It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
Galileo Galilei
#96. Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.
H.G.Wells
#97. Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.
Matthew Scully
#98. Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know - the Church does neither.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#99. When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.
George Bernard Shaw
#100. The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.
David Cameron
