Quotes About Prophets

The prophets preach . . . that pleasure, not will-power and coercion, is how you most deeply transform people.

What's the truth? The truth is what people WANT. Liars are basically idealists, liars are saints and prophets. Jesus was a liar.

There are always more impostors than seers among public men, more false prophets than true ones, more prophets of Baal than of Jehovah; and Jerusalem is always in danger from the Assyrians.

Wherever a heart beats with love, wherever Faith and Reason utter their oracles, there is God, as formerly in the hearts of seers and prophets. No soil on earth is so holy as the good man's heart.

for He could not have reminded those who witnessed His works, and heard Him preach, of all the prophets in turn, unless He had comprehended them all in His one person. The very diversity of opinion respecting Him, therefore, showed that a greater than Elias, or Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, or Daniel, had appeared.

If all things were made through Him, clearly so must the splendid revelations have been which were made to the fathers and prophets, and became to them the symbols of the sacred mysteries of religion.

Resorting to a psychological explanation is less innocent than it appears. In refusing the mimetic interpretation, in looking for the failure of Peter in purely individual causes, we attempt to demonstrate, unconsciously of course, that in Peter's place we would have responded differently; we would not have denied Jesus. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees for an older version of the same ploy when he sees them build tombs for the prophets that their fathers killed.

The Gospels suggest that a mimetic process of rejection exists in all communities and not only among the Jews. The prophets are the preferential victims of this process, a little like all exceptional persons, individuals who are different.

The resemblance of Jesus to the prophets is perfectly real, and we will soon see that these resemblances are not restricted to the victims of collective violence in the Bible. In myths as well, the victims are or seem different.

Many false prophets are gone out. Are gone out, that is, are manifest. Before, they lay hid in the Church, but now, by their schisms, they have made themselves known.

Touching the causes why false prophets, with so great danger of their souls, do depart from the Church: if we respect them as they are indeed, I can say nothing, but as it is contained in the old distinction: "they were in the Church, but not of the Church."

True it is that Almighty God, if it had stood with His good pleasure, could easily have brought it to pass, in spite of the Devil, that there should never have been any such false prophets or heresies amongst us. But He saw it not to be expedient; for, as the Apostle saith, by His directions, "There must be heresies in the Church ... that faith, by having temptation, might also have probation."

Of the times in like manner wherein we now live, the Apostle Paul did prophecy that there should be many false prophets: and we do see his sayings therein to be fulfilled.

His task is to proclaim the fulfilment of what God had revealed to the prophets of the past. The whole book is saturated with allusions to Old Testament prophecy, though there are no formal quotations. As a prophet himself, John need not quote his predecessors, but he takes up and reinterprets their prophecies, much as the later writers in the Old Testament prophetic tradition themselves took up and reinterpreted earlier prophecies.

It seems that John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but understands himself to be writing at the climax of the tradition, when all the eschatological oracles of the prophets are about to be finally fulfilled, and so he interprets and gathers them up in his own prophetic revelation. What makes him a Christian prophet is that he does so in the light of the fulfilment already of Old Testament prophetic expectation in the victory of the Lamb, the Messiah Jesus.

I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.

God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.

Without some deconstruction, everything becomes idolatrous. The prophets were religious deconstructionists.

To know the Lord and his ways," as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.

There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.

Prayer, to the patriarchs and prophets, was more than the recital of well-known and well-worn phrases-it was the outpouring of the heart.

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speakA lasting inspiration, sanctifiedBy reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,Others will love, and we will teach them how;Instruct them how the mind of man becomesA thousand times more beautiful than the earthOn which he dwells.

History bears witness to the vital part that the 'prophets' have played in human progress—which is evidence of the ultimate practical value of expressing unreservedly the truth as one sees it. Yet it also becomes clear that the acceptances and spreading of that vision has always depended on another class of men—"leaders" who had to be philosophical strategists, striking a compromise between truth and men's receptivity to it.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.