Top 15 Neville Figgis Quotes

Man is so made that he cannot be satisfied with less than the highest, and that he must be beaten down before he can be raised up.

Christ does not reveal Himself to those who are satisfied. Why should He? They do not want Him.

The Gospel is the freshest and most original thing in the world, while the tone of modern intellectualism, with all its culture, is at bottom commonplace and middle aged.

Religion without a Church is not really possible, for not only is man a social animal, but religion is essentially social. And more and more is the comparative study of religion making it clear that men are fundamentally religious.

The naturalistic theory of Christianity takes on different colours with the temperament of the speaker. From the hysterical contempt of Nietzsche, the hostility of writers like Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Sturt, we may pass through almost every stage of increasing admiration, with one great proviso, that Jesus is not to be worshipped as God.

True, the Christian Church still lives on. But it is only a living power in small groups. Some of its apparent strength is due to its inherited wealth and to the general lack of education. All this, however, is but for the moment.

It is strange what an attraction the Christian Church still possesses even for men who scorn her claims.

Christianity may be true or false, but it makes claims subversive of all the rationalist projections of life. It rests on presuppositions which cannot by any ingenuity be reconciled with any view which denies the miraculous, the unique, the individual. Its whole meaning comes from a faith in a life of spirits behind the veil. It cannot without hopeless error be confused with those systems which deny such a life or treat it as impersonal.

The whole movement of the Christian Church may be a delusion, and then we are all in the dark, except that the darkness has been made visible by the pathetic splendour of Christianity.

The Christian says that life is a good thing, but has been marred by sin; and suffers from the growing pains of youth.

If we are not immortal, we may be possessed by the world, we cannot possess it; we are strangers, it is our enemy; we take a little and then are gone. If we are to go on, we can appropriate it, make it our own, so that its beauty and its sorrow, all its mystery and its splendid acts, become part of us and shine for ever in a spirit that lives with God. Even worldliness demand otherworldliness to justify it. Only the immortals have a right to feel at home in this world.

Our world is fonder of riches, perhaps, than ever it was, but I think that it is ceasing to believe in its idol. The danger is that it should cease to have any belief at all.

The universe contemplated by religion is by no means self-contained or self-sufficient, it is dependent for its origin and maintenance, as we are for daily bread and future hopes, upon the power and good-will of a being or beings of which science has no knowledge.

The test of a civilisation is in its characteristic culture and in the type of men and women who thrive best in it.

Physical science is indeed valued, but mainly because it is hoped to increase the chances of money-making. Take the Western world through, and what unity can you find either in religion or thought or practical ideals except the desire for riches? I think I am not exaggerating.