Parables Quotes

Jesus communicated parables to the secular people around him and he used stories that were very relevant to their lives, and He was taking heaven's truth and packaging it in an earthly context.

Jesus told parables. When he wanted to say something really profound about God, he went into parable. I don't find it surprising then that when earliest Christianity wanted to say something profound about Jesus, they went into parable too. That doesn't mean everything is a parable. When it says Jesus was in Nazareth I don't think that's a parable, I think Jesus was in Nazareth. When it talks about Jesus walking on the water, I don't think that's the point at all, I think the point is that the church without Jesus sinks.

We have a 'now you see Him, now you don't' God. We have Himself clothed in visions, in dreams, in metaphors, in parables, in the poetry of the Bible, and in all the ordinariness of the lives we live.

whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable.

In seventeen of His thirty-seven parables, Jesus dealt with property and man's responsibility for using it wisely.

Our lives are like the talents in the parable of the three stewards. It is something that has been given to us for the time being and we have the opportunity and privilege of doing our best with this precious gift.

--"There is no justice in love...it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.

It is for this reason that Jesus left us the parable of the unfaithful servant, inviting us into a sincere fraternity in order that through it we could find the path of rehabilitation.

I'd like to be remembered as the sower of seeds. That's the greatest parable in the bible as far as I'm concerned. Some seeds fall in the pathway, get stomped on and don't grow. Some fall on the stones and don't even sprout, but others fall on the ground and multiply a thousand fold.

From the time God saved me at 21 years old, I've always been fascinated by the parables of Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.

Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

Christ, in the parable of the vine dressers, has taught us a sublime lesson of justice, by showing that to the things which are not our own, we can have no just claim.

Where possible Paul avoids quoting the teaching of Jesus, in fact even mentioning it. If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the sermon on the mount, and had taught His disciples the 'Our Father.' Even where they are specially relevant, Paul passes over the words of the Lord.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Christ said "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" and when asked "who is thy neighbour? went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was understood by his hearers, you should substitute "Germans and Japanese" for Samaritan. I fear my modern day Christians would resent such a substitution, because it would compel them to realize how far they have departed from the teachings of the founder of their religion.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

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!

I don't think God is a gender. He presents himself as a father but he comes to us with the tenderness of a mother. In some of the parables, he is the housewife who cleans the house looking for the lost coin. So I think we can miss the point if we get too concerned about the gender of God.

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.

The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).

Christ does not save us by acting a parable of divine love; he acts the parable of divine love by saving us. That is the Christian faith.

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.

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. 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. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

A parable: A man was examining the construction of a cathedral. He asked a stone mason what he was doing chipping the stones, and the mason replied, "I am making stones." He asked a stone carver what he was doing. "I am carving a gargoyle." And so it went, each person said in detail what they were doing. Finally he came to an old woman who was sweeping the ground. She said. "I am helping build a cathedral." ...Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one special part of the whole and does not think of how what they are doing relates to the larger picture.

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.

No man can prophesy with another's parable.

The growth of all the plants of the garden from seeds and roots keep us mindful, in accordance with of the Parable of the Sower, of the need for our loving, mortified reception and cultivation in our hearts and souls of the seeds and roots of the supernatural gifts and virtues necessary for progress in the ascetical/mystical ascent of our souls toward union with God and with the divine will for Creation and Kingdom

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.

He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.

I am really interested in who owns ideas of religion. What if I say I'm a libertarian, socialist, Occupy-supporting, anti-war, Christian? Is that a controversial idea? I don't see anything really in the original semiotics of Christianity, in the specific parable of the radical socialist Jew from Galilee who becomes the hero figure in the Homeric-word-of-mouth-gossip-novel that becomes the Bible that should make that a paradox.

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.

He knows of our anguish, and He is there for us. Like the Good Samaritan in His parable, when He finds us wounded at the wayside, He binds up our wounds and cares for us (see Luke 10:34). Brothers and sisters, the healing power of His Atonement is for you, for us, for all.

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.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less of "hands across the sea," and a little more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.

What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.

Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.

Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.

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.

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

Service is the rent we pay for living.

Let the Bible be the Bible. It's not about science. It's not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.

The parable of the talents is a good analogy of what happens when we give. When we merely try to hold on to what is given or entrusted to us, life may seem to take away even that. But when we choose to use what life has given us, the return of abundance can include friendship, companionship, financial blessings, homes, transportation, and security in wonderful ways. The universe holds nothing back from the one who lovingly and sincerely gives.

Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.

He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable.