SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES V

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

Man is double, having an animal and a spiritual nature, at war with one another.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: nature


The good, the true, and the beautiful, are three faces of the same ideal of perfection, the Infinite.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: perfection


The cravings of the soul of man before music and painting were discovered must have resembled the stutterings for impossible utterance in the dumb.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: music


Hell's foundations quiver
At the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices,
Loud your anthems raise.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

"Onward Christian Soldiers"

Tags: praise


Worship is the subjection of the personality of the worshipper to the object worshipped; it is therefore the affirmation of the relations the two personalities bear to one another.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: personality


In vain is it argued that we are to give up our private judgment to a revelation; we can only admit the authority of the revelation by an act of our individual judgment.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: authority


Supreme happiness to reason, that is the Ideal of the intellect, is the attainment of certainty upon every subject and about all things.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: happiness


As the animal life has its law of progress, so has the spiritual life; as the former has its wants, so has the latter; as the accomplishment of the animal wants is attended by complete satisfaction, so is the realization of the spiritual wants signalized by contentment.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: contentment


My dear sir, if we only talked about what we understood, our conversation would be extremely limited.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Only a Ghost

Tags: conversation


Our convictions are the facts assured to us on the testimony of our own nature, our own senses, or our own reason.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: facts


Personality is, in fact, only a free being emphasizing and recognizing itself as such. Every man makes his own personality, he is to that extent his own creator.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: personality


Thus there opens out to man a magnificent prospect of advance in the acquisition of truth, beauty and goodness; for if these are three aspects of the Ideal, three indefinite realities never to be attained in their entirety, because by their nature they are infinite, the progress of man in science, art and virtue is without possible limit.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: art


Now, as a ghost, of course I am invisible, but when I wish for information I have the power of investing myself with the outward appearance of an intelligent stranger, and of assuming the language of the country in which I am sojourning. People who would naturally be shy of a Greek-speaking ghost, might have no objection to impart information to a quiet looking stranger dressed in black, and indulging in broken English.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Only a Ghost

Tags: appearance


The notion of the first man having been of both sexes till the separation, was very common. He was said to have been male on the right side and female on the left, and that one half of him was removed to constitute Eve, but that the complete man consists of both sexes.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters


Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,
But the church of Jesus constant will remain.
Gates of hell can never 'gainst that church prevail;
We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

"Onward Christian Soldiers"

Tags: church


To create is to love, to will the creature for itself. The creature is therefore willed as its own end. God wills that the creature should be. He wills it in the interest of the creature. He wills its good, and its good consists in the realization of its being.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


Society is the theatre, obligatory for the emancipation and development of the creative power in man. To reject social life is to deprive ourselves of the power of profiting by the experience of the past and the present.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: power


Evil is the rejection of the infinite for the finite.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


Human authority may furnish conviction, but never certainty. Divine authority is immutable and infallible.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: authority


The idea of the supernatural is not a rational verity. It belongs to the sentiment which is the faculty of perceiving the infinite, whereas the reason is, by its nature, finite. God is perceived by the heart, not concluded by the mind.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God