…A dialogue between Bible-lovers, Bible-haters, and everyone in-between…
“I am a creature of a day. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God. I want to know one thing: the way to heaven. God himself has condescended to teach me the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh, give me that book! At any price give me the book of God. Let me be a man of one book.” ——John Wesley
“No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.” ——George Bernard Shaw
“It is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to open one.” ——William Sloane Coffin
“The Holy Book of the living God suffers more from its exponents today than from its opponents.” ——Leonard Ravenhill
“It will greatly help you to understand scripture if you note – not only what is spoken and written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goes before and what follows.” ——Miles Coverdale
“When you read God’s Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, ‘It is talking to me, and about me.'” ——Soren Kierkegaard
“Never place a period where God has placed a comma. God is still speaking.” ——Gracie Allen
“We do not read the Bible the way it is; we read it the way we are.” ——Evelyn Uyemura
“Bible reading is an education in itself.” ——Lord Tennyson
“Reading the Bible without meditating on it is like trying to eat without swallowing.” ——Anonymous
“The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.” ——Thomas Paine
“It is not at all incredible, that a book which has been so long in the possession of mankind should contain many truths as yet undiscovered.” ——Bishop Butler
“It is clear that there must be difficulties for us in a revelation such as the Bible. If someone were to hand me a book that was as simple to me as the multiplication table, and say, ‘This is the Word of God. In it He has revealed His whole will and wisdom,’ I would shake my head and say, ‘I cannot believe it; that is too easy to be a perfect revelation of infinite wisdom.’ There must be, in any complete revelation of God’s mind and will and character and being, things hard for the beginner to understand; and the wisest and best of us are but beginners.” ——R.A. Torrey
“The letter of Scripture is a veil just as much as it is a revelation; hiding while it reveals, and yet revealing while it hides.” ——Andrew Jukes
“Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs.” ——Henry Ward Beecher
“There is a way of reading the Bible that seems to leave God far away, off in the shadows somewhere. It is all information and technicalities and knowledge, but it feels like you’re sitting with your back towards God. You come up against a difficulty or question, and you go to books, you ask pastors, friends, strangers on the internet, anyone but Him. Gradually God gets smaller and dimmer.” ——Unknown
“Some people like to read so many [Bible] chapters every day. I would not dissuade them from the practice, but I would rather lay my soul asoak in half a dozen verses all day than rinse my hand in several chapters. Oh, to be bathed in a text of Scripture, and to let it be sucked up in your very soul, till it saturates your heart!” ——Charles Haddon Spurgeon
“In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with ‘Thus saith the Lord’. It is not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite — it excludes or repels — the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force… It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long, except to those who go to it for something quite different. I predict that it will in the future be read, as it always has been read, almost exclusively by Christians.” ——C.S. Lewis
“We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world.… It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.” ——J.I. Packer
“The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.” ——A.W. Tozer
“The Bible is a harp with a thousand strings. Play on one to the exclusion of its relationship to the others, and you will develop discord. Play on all of them, keeping them in their places in the divine scale, and you will hear heavenly music all the time.” ——William P. White
“For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year. If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.” ——Martin Luther
“Here, then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to study God’s Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy.” ——R.C. Sproul
“One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed.” ——Leonard Ravenhill
“The scripture in times of disputes is like an open town in times of war, which serves indifferently the occasions of both parties.” ——Alexander Pope
“Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.” ——Ludwig von Mises
“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.” ——Mccosh
“Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.” ——Mark Twain
“The Bible is the greatest example of the whole being greater than its parts.” ——Michael Phillips
“Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the Lord’s Prayer.” ——Napoleon
“The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed.” ——Patrick Henry
“Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in ever greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires, beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the gospels, it will not go.” ——Goethe
“Who decides what is right and wrong in the world? Who has the authority to define morality for all of creation? It is not the courts, congress, the media, public opinion, the ‘politically correct’ police, the ‘tolerance’ brigade or even the church. The only answer has been, is and always will be Jesus Christ. You can find His opinion on a great variety of subjects in His best seller… The Bible.” ——Jeffrey E. Ramey
“You may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God, and give it to the devil, if you do not desire to live according to it.” ——Martin Luther
“The word of God hidden in the heart is a stubborn voice to suppress.” ——Billy Graham
“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” ——George Washington
“I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this Book that you can by reason and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better man. It is the best Book which God has given to man.” ——Abraham Lincoln
“I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year.” ——John Quincy Adams
“If there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the credit is due to my parents for instilling in me an early love of the Scriptures.” ——Daniel Webster
“Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.” ——John Ruskin
“I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount.” ——Martin Luther
“If you believe that exposing your children to violence is a problem, by all means keep them away from the Bible.” ——Rev. Charles Henderson
“The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.” ——Henry L. Mencken
“The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.” ——Charles Dickens
“The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.” ——Thomas Carlyle
“Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and still man’s obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and guide would be gone; the same voyage to make, but his chart and compass would be overboard!” ——Henry Ward Beecher
“The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.” ——Immanuel Kant
“The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it.” ——Thomas Huxley