Heresy Quotes

Sometimes painfully lost people can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know, or be reminded of---the more history changes, the more it stays the same.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress.Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought.Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.

~ Frank Herbert

I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.

~ Giordano Bruno

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

~ William Blake

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

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Actually, it meant a great deal: a very great deal. You don't have to believe that God exists to see that a story in which God takes on human form is a very different story from one in which God creates a messenger and tells that messenger to take on human form. The Passion of the Christ is a different movie depending on whether you think the person being eviscerated is God or just some guy. Athanasius thought that it was God who hung on a cross for the world; Arius thought that it was a created being who was not God. This is not very little; this is very big. Granted, the Creeds put it in terms of Aristotelian theories about substance and essence: but there isn't much sense in complaining that technical documents are written in technical language if you are not prepared to pick up a standard work and look up what the words mean.

~ Andrew Rilstone

Mis-information is rampant in this great age of mass-information. While we have more access to learning than ever before in the history of the world, we’re actually getting dumber it seems. The amount of (mis)information at everyone's fingertips has lured us into a false sense of knowing. Whether it be information about science, politics, or theology, our society is suffering from an inability to research, process, filter, and apply. At the same time we seem entirely oblivious to the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) that is nihilistic and libertine, making everything relative and subjective. And Satan himself rushes to blur our vision, stirring up the dust of confusion. The church must respond by teaching the critical faculties of logic and spiritual discernment, embedded in a cohesive framework of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). We must obtain a reasonable faith that is consistent with historic Christianity and relevant for our post-modern age. Otherwise, those rejecting the blatant errors of religious fundamentalism will be susceptible to every wind of false doctrine and repackaged heresy imaginable. They will leave the orthodox faith and accept something that vaguely resembles Christianity, but in reality is a vile concoction of demonic lies.

~ David D. Flowers

In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.

~ Thomas Gold

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Holy Spirit did not go into such detail about the Pharisees in the New Testament just so we could understand a group unique to the first century. Pharisaism is a poisonous weed that grows in every garden of orthodox religion. Pharisaism is every bit the threat to the orthodox today that it was then.

~ J.d. Greear

Brand-new truths are probably not Truths.

~ John Piper

It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.

~ S.j. Parris

The real difference between Francis and Dominic, which is no discredit to either of them, is that Dominic did happen to be confronted with a huge campaign for the conversion of heretics, while Francis had only the more subtle task of the conversion of human beings.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong, it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right, it practically means being wrong.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Secularization—that is, the gradual conformity of our thinking, beliefs, commitments, and practices to the pattern of this fading age—is not just something that happens to the church; it is something that happens in the church. In fact, it’s difficult to think of secularism as anything other than a Christian heresy.

~ Michael S. Horton

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

~ John C. Polanyi

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

~ Helen Keller