Quotes About Contentions

Accursed is that peace of which revolt from God is the bond, and blessed are those contentions by which it is necessary to maintain the kingdom of Christ.

It may be remarked incidentally that the contentions of philosophers are often much more justifiable when they are arguing against other philosophers than when they pass on to expound their own views, and as each one generally sees fairly clearly the defects of the others, they more or less destroy one another mutually.

From one who returns our affection, glances of the eye, for instance, are pleasing, questions are pleasing, answers are pleasing, and little contentions and resentments are the most pleasing and fascinating of all.

A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle.

A foolish son is the calamity of his father: and the contentions of a wife are a continual dropping.

Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.

I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause ; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind. [ Letter to Sir Edward Newenham, 22 June 1792 ]

One of the great commandments of science is, Mistrust arguments from authority. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude.

Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions.

Saying I love you and forgiving each other without holding grudges are very powerful ways of doing spiritual warfare. Without saying it, you are declaring, "Satan, you can't have my marriage!" The enemy of your soul desires that you be constantly involved in contentions.

He railed at ecclesiastical bureaucracy, particularly the theological hairsplitting and heresy-hunting that had come to characterize Presbyterian conclaves: "These things in the Presbyterian church, their contentions and janglings are so ridiculous, so wicked, so outrageous, that no doubt there is a jubilee in hell every year, about the time of the meeting of the General Assembly."8