Top 100 Quotes About Paganism
#1. I have heard that Paganism is for broken people, but life cracks everyone in some way. We are a religion of healing people.
Thomm Quackenbush
#2. In paganism light is mixed with darkness, and religion and truth are blended with superstition and error.
Lindley Murray
#3. Pagans were wiser then paganism; that is why the pagans became Christians.
G.K. Chesterton
#4. What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.
Desiderius Erasmus
#5. Paganism attributes the creation of the world to blind chance.
Richard Baxter
#6. Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.
David Hare
#7. Our generation is lost to the truth of God, to the reality of divine revelation, to the content of God's will, to the power of His redemption, and to the authority of His Word. For this loss it is paying dearly in a swift relapse into paganism.
Carl F. H. Henry
#8. People in minority religious communities, like Paganism, often feel isolated and even marginalized by others because of the lifestyle differences associated with their spiritual path.
Brendan Myers
#9. The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.
Thomas Jefferson
#10. God may normally work through ordinary means. But he is not limited by them. That is why all the military muscle in the world cannot itself guarantee victory, and all the secularization, postmodernism, naturalism, and paganism in the world cannot by themselves prevent revival. Let God be God.
D. A. Carson
#11. To exclude religious teaching altogether from education ... is a very dangerous and curious tendency. The result is to give paganism a new importance and influence.
Nicholas Murray Butler
#12. Popery is the gospel transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Paganism, under a few of the accidents of Christianity.
James Aitken Wylie
#13. Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
#14. Most religions are concerned about what happens when you die, about going somewhere better than here as a reward for faithful service or whatever you want to call it. Paganism teaches that being here is the reward, and that we need to make the most of it and leave the world a better place.
Michael Thomas Ford
#15. 'Theogony' should be read before the great Homeric epics because it gives an account of the cosmology that is taken for granted by Homer. It does for paganism what the Old Testament attempted to do for monotheism.
Tariq Ali
#16. I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism.
Theodore Roosevelt
#17. Increasing numbers of Pagans are identifying themselves as animists or naming their worldview as animism. Some Pagans use the term animism to refer to one strand within their Paganism, while others identify it as the most appropriate label for everything they do.
Graham Harvey
#18. Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.
H.P. Lovecraft
#19. Paganism is more of an attitude of mind than a fixed creed. It is always tempting to ask, "what do Pagans believe?" but a better question is "what do Pagans do?
Yvonne Aburrow
#20. Authors as diverse as Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien have shaped modern paganism as greatly as any theological underpinnings.
Liz Williams
#21. Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of
G.K. Chesterton
#22. Abortion ... was probably regarded by the average Roman of the later days of Paganism much as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#23. Paganism is the worship of life itself in its supreme mysteries of ecstasy and love.
Jane Ellen Harrison
#24. At the beginning of a new year, many people have nothing better to do than to make a list of bad deeds and resolve from now on - how many such "from-now-ons" have there already been! - to begin with better intentions, but they are still stuck in the middle of their paganism.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#25. There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it?
Thomm Quackenbush
#26. Modern Western culture has become a mixture of paganism and Christianity. We are a blend of both. We talk of God, but we often act as though we are atheists.
Billy Graham
#27. Call it a case of observer bias on my part, but Humanist Paganism seems to be an emerging option for those who want to be part of the Pagan community, but who want to be a little more intellectual about their practices, and they really don't care about the 'woo' anymore.
Brendan Myers
#28. Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.
Liz Williams
#29. The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition; and may therefore deserve to be considered, as a singular event in the history of the human mind.
Edward Gibbon
#30. In that way, we Jews can see Christianity as God's chosen instrument for redeeming the world from paganism, and Christians can recognize their obligation to preach the message of Christianity to the world, but not to the Jewish people, who had that message before they did.
Harold S. Kushner
#31. Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life ...
Aleister Crowley
#32. In what did the emancipating message of Christianity consist but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked?
William James
#33. The Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.
William L. Shirer
#34. Since the Icelandic volcano obviously needs a virgin sacrifice and the Catholic Church obviously needs new leadership the Pope must volunteer to jump in the volcano. Pontiff, don't think of it as endorsing paganism, think of it as supersizing Ash Wednesday.
Bill Maher
#35. The more I see of Italy and her treasures, the more I see paganism in Christianity ...
Henrietta Szold
#36. Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking.
Thomm Quackenbush
#37. Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.
Will Durant
#38. The virtue of paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience.
Augustus Hare
#39. The nature of Paganism is that of exploring, evolution, and opening up.
Gede Parma
#40. Paganism therefore implies the rejection of this discontinuity, this rupture, this fundamental tear, which is the "dualistic fiction," which, as Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist, "degenerated God into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!
Alain De Benoist
#41. Because contemporary paganism is essentially so new, its underlying ethical structure is not particularly sophisticated.
Liz Williams
#42. And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting -
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.
Alberto Caeiro
#44. She changes everything she touches. And everything she touches changes.
Starhawk
#46. Nature is also God's way of communicating with us. Jesus himself used nature to teach us about God. He used birds and flowers, the weather, precious stones ... Looking at nature, we can come to understand God himself.
Adelina St. Clair
#47. Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
A wind passes very lightly
And goes away, always very lightly.
And I don't know what I think
And I don't want to know.
Alberto Caeiro
#48. In art and mythology, the Goddess appears in three forms. White represents the virgin, red the mother, and black, the crone, or the death-goddess.
Erin O'Riordan
#49. I don't regret anything I was before because I still am.
I only regret not having loved you.
Put your hands in mine
And let's be quiet, surrounded by life.
Alberto Caeiro
#51. Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.
Alvaro De Campos
#52. The Socialists have found good the equality, and bad the inequality. Good the servants and bad the tyrants. I crossed the threshold of good and evil in order to live my life intensely. I live today and can not await tomorrow. The wait is of peoples and of humanity, so could not be my affair.
Renzo Novatore
#53. Once you realize that the universe is made up of processes, not things, you are really on a roll, for what makes life truly interesting are the connections between events.
Silver RavenWolf
#55. That thing over there was more there than it's there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn't exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn't look very much,
Alberto Caeiro
#56. Things don't have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
Alberto Caeiro
#57. Let's only care about the place where we are.
There's beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else.
If there's someone beyond the curve in the road,
Let them worry about what's past the curve in the road,
That's what the road is to them.
Alberto Caeiro
#58. But if God is the flowers and the trees
And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,
Then I believe in him,
Then I believe in him all the time,
And my whole life is an oration and a mass,
And a communion with my eyes and through my ears.
Alberto Caeiro
#59. There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?
But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a moment.
No wind whatsoever brought you now.
Now you're here.
What you were isn't you, or else the whole rose would be here.
Alberto Caeiro
#60. Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.
Alvaro De Campos
#61. Let's be simple and calm,
Like brooks and trees,
And God will love us by making
Beautiful things like the trees and brooks for us,
And give us greenness in his spring,
And a river for us to go to when we end...
Alberto Caeiro
#62. It is interesting to note that the overwhelming majority of all human beings who have ever lived were or currently are Pagans.
Mary Faulkner
#63. and the idea of nothingness - the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling - has, in my dear master's work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks.
Alvaro De Campos
#64. If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I've got it.
I'm a mystic, but only in my body,
My soul is simple and doesn't think.
Alberto Caeiro
#66. Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred.
Thomm Quackenbush
#67. And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,
And commerce, and the ships leaving
Their smoke on the high seas.
Because he knows all of this lacks the truth
A flower has in its blooming
And which moves with the sunlight
Changing the hills and valleys
Alberto Caeiro
#68. All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,
Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.
Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.
To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy.
Alberto Caeiro
#69. On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,
And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.
Alberto Caeiro
#70. Night doesn't fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts
The night falls concretely
And the shining of stars exists like it had weight.
Alberto Caeiro
#71. Jaweh is clearly not a Nature-God. He does not die and come to life each year as a true Corn-king should. He may give wine and fertility, but must not be worshipped with Bacchanalian or aphrodisiac rites.
C.S. Lewis
#73. My work as a Meridian Psychotherapist and Clinical Hypnotherapist has taught me that people often feel guilty about the way they feel or think and many do not realise that seasonal changes can have a profound effect on the psyche.
Carole Carlton
#74. Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.
Doreen Valiente
#75. The river of my village doesn't make you think about anything.
When you're at its bank you're only at its bank.
Alberto Caeiro
#76. Those of us who embrace the feminine know its strength.
Betsy Cornwell
#79. You say we worship the sun; so do you.
Tertullian
#81. I was born subject like others to errors and defects,
But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,
Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect..
Never to the defect of demanding of the World
That it be anything that's not the World.
Alberto Caeiro
#82. The salvation of man does not lie in his holding himself far removed from the worldly, but in consecrating it to holy, to divine meaning.
Martin Buber
#83. Listen,' she whispered and pointed towards the window. 'Whenever the wind blows from the east and the wind chimes dance in the moonlight, there is magic in the air.
Carole Carlton
#84. When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods.
Thomm Quackenbush
#85. the Great Vaccination - the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia.
Alvaro De Campos
#86. If science wants to be truthful,
What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?
I close my eyes and the hard earth where I'm lying
Has a reality so real even my back feels it.
I don't need reason - I have shoulderblades.
Alberto Caeiro
#87. If you are drawn to the left hand path, it's usually because you've had some kind of life experience that has shocked you, awakened you.
Nikolas Schreck
#88. Where once I prayed for forgiveness from a father God who held up huge palms and said "Thou shalt not," now I find peace with a sister god who takes my open hands in hers and says, "You will.
Betsy Cornwell
#89. And if the earth Gods wreak vengeance on the sinless and the sinful alike, then this further destruction cannot be punishment for sins, but is in the way of all nature.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#90. The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset?
Alberto Caeiro
#91. (Marlowe's) Faustus stubbornly reverts to his atheistic beliefs and continues his elementary pagan re-education ~ the inferno to him is a 'place' invented by men.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#92. Tis the witching hour of night,
Orbed is the moon and bright,
And the stars they glisten, glisten,
Seeming with bright eyes to listen
For what they listen?
John Keats
#93. I don't know what understanding myself is. I don't look inside.
I don't believe I exist behind myself.
Alberto Caeiro
#94. If I talk about her like she's a being
It's because talking about her I need to use the language of men
Which gives personality to things,
And imposes a name on things.
Alberto Caeiro
#95. Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
Dorothy Parker
#96. I'm glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I've read.
Alberto Caeiro
#97. Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.
Martin Buber
#98. Even so, I'm somebody.
I'm the Discoverer of Nature.
I'm the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring a new Universe to the Universe
Because I bring the Universe to itself.
Alberto Caeiro
#99. Olympus is still a patriarchy. Zeus heads his royal household as jealously as Jehovah rules his harem of dull, harp-playing angels. Both are templates for order on earth, don't you think?
Cliff James
#100. Magic is that paganistic reversal of the process of religion, in which man, instead of letting himself be used by God for the divine purpose, drags down his god to the level of a tool, which he uses for his own selfish purpose.
Geerhardus Vos
