SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IX

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

But the right of might is not a right, it is the violation of right; and the obligation to obey the strongest is not a duty, it is a physical necessity. It is playing with words to call that a right which is a faculty growing and waning with the power which imposes it, and that a duty which is necessary submission to a power against which resistance is vain.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: duty


I do not tread on you save when you grovel in the dirt.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Urith


Wisdom is inconceivable apart from something about which it can be called into operation.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


That which mankind wanted, and wants still, is not new truths, but the co-ordination of all aspects of the truth.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: truth


What then is Error? It is nothing per se. It is the opposition of one relative truth against another to the exclusion of the latter.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: truth


The life of the animal is more complete than that of the vegetable, for it intervenes more spontaneously and more efficaciously in the double function of self-protection and continuance of the species.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: life


Hitherto Christianity has leaned, or has been represented as leaning, on authority--on the authority of an infallible text, or of an inerrable Church. The inadequacy of either support has been repeatedly demonstrated, and as the props have been withdrawn, the faith of many has fallen with a crash.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: authority


God's existence escapes demonstration; it is idle to ask reason to prove what is beyond its scope, for reason is the faculty of dealing with the finite.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: reason