Transubstantiation Quotes

• What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. This has been said very briefly, which may perhaps be sufficient for faith; yet faith does not desire instruction

  Saint Augustine

  Eye, Holy Eucharist, Blood

  13 Copy quote

• Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

  Anne Michaels

  Philosophy, Moving, Sacrifice

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.109, Emblem Editions

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Jesus, Hero, Names

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.179, Penguin UK

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 'Eat my flesh,' Jesus says, 'and drink my blood.' The Lord supplies us with these intimate nutrients, he delivers over his flesh and pours out his blood, and nothing is lacking for the growth of his children

  Clement of Alexandria

  Jesus, Children, Blood

  55 Copy quote

• Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

  John the Baptist

  Bible, Christian, Religious

  118 Copy quote

• Give us this day our daily mask.

  Tom Stoppard

  Bible, Prayer, Bread Of Life

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, p.31, Faber & Faber

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution, - there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion.

  Lord Byron

  Real, Greek, Doubt

  30 Copy quote

• Neither was there any heresy, or diversity of opinion, or disputing about the matter, till the pope had gathered a council to confirm this transubstantiation: wherefore it is most likely that this opinion came up by them of latter days.

  William Tyndale

  Diversity, Matter, Opinion

  William Tyndale, John Frith, Thomas Russell (1831). “The Works of the English Reformers: The works of Tyndale, (continued:) An answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue ; An exposition upon the 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters of Matthew ; An exposition upon the 1st epistle of St. John ; A pathway into the Holy Scripture ; The sacrament of baptism, and the sacrament of the body and blood of our saviour Jesus Christ”, p.540

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it you are deemed fit to govern the country.

  Jonathan Meades

  Country, Believe, Garden

  17 Copy quote

• To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

  Edna O'Brien

  Book, Men, Numbers

  19 Copy quote

• For a Man cannot believe a Miracle without relying upon Sense, nor Transubstantiation without renouncing it. So that never were any two things so ill coupled together as the Doctrine of Christianity and that of Transubstantiation, because they draw several ways, and are ready to strangle one another: For the main Evidence of the Christian Doctrine, which is Miracles, is resolved into the certainty of Sense, but this Evidence is clear and point blank against Transubstantiation.

  John Tillotson

  Christian, Believe, Men

  John Tillotson (1685). “A discourse against transubstantiation”, p.40

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• If defamation of religion was illegal it would be a crime for me to say that the notion of transubstantiation is so ridiculous that even a small child should be able to see the insanity and utter physical impossibility of a piece of bread and some wine somehow taking on corporeal form.

  Ian O'Doherty

  Children, Wine, Insanity

  4 Copy quote

• Had Mr. Gibbon lived in France, Spain, or Italy, he might with the fame reason have ranked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the worship of saints and angels among the essentials of Christianity, as the doctrines of the trinity and of the atonement.

  Joseph Priestley

  Angel, Spain, Essentials

  Joseph Priestley (1793). “An History of the Corruptions of Christianity”, p.469

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is with artworks as it is with wine: it is much better when we do not need either one, when we stick with water, and when out of our own inner fire, the inner sweetness of our own soul, we turn the water over and over again into wine ourselves.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Art, Wine, Fire

  6 Copy quote