Tertullian Quotes
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The more you mow us down, the more numerous we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.
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Christians are made, not born.
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Woman is a temple built over a sewer.
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The state of faith allows no mention of impossibility.
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Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading.
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Let women paint their eyes with tints of chastity.
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Prevention of birth is a precipitation of murder.
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Away with the one who is always seeking, for he never finds anything; for he is seeking where nothing can be found. Away with the one who is always knocking, for he knocks where there is no one to open; away with the one who is always asking, for he asks of one who does not hear.
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It is not permitted for a woman to speak in the church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer the eucharist, nor to claim for herself a share in any masculine function- not to mention any priestly office.
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Two kinds of blindness are easily combined so that those who do not see really appear to see what is not.
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Shall we carry a flag? It is a rival to Christ.
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Custom without truth is error grown old.
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Hope is patience with the lamp lit.
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Whatever is born is the work of God. So whatever is plastered on, is the devil's work.... How unworthy of the Christian name it is to wear a fictitious face - you on whom simplicity in every form is enjoined! You, to whom lying with the tongue is not lawful, are lying in appearance.
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Offerings to propitiate the dead then were regarded as belonging to the class of funeral sacrifices, and these are idolatry. Idolatry, in fact, is a sort of homage to the departed, the one as well as the other is a service to dead men. Moreover, demons dwell in the images of the dead. ... this sort of exhibition has passed from honors of the dead to honors of the living; I mean, to quaestorships financial overseers and magistractes, to priestly offices of different kinds. Yet, since idolatry still cleaves to the dignity's name, whatever is done in its name partakes of its impurity.
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Prevention of birth is premature murder, and it makes no difference whether it is a life already born that one snatches away or a life that is coming to birth.
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The whole fruit is already present in the seed.
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We worship unity in trinity, and trinity in unity; neither confounding the person nor dividing the substance. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
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Hermogenes despises God's law in his painting, maintains repeated marriages almost certainly a reference to remarrying after divorce or perhaps even widowhood, which Tertullian, who became a Montanist, opposed, alleges the law of God in defense of lust likely same reference, and yet despises it in respect of his art.
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If the Tiber rises too high, or the Nile too low, the remedy is always feeding Christians to the lions.
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If we refuse our homage to statues and frigid images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with which hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not merit praise instead of penalty Christians were punished for not worshiping Roman gods that we have rejected what we have come to see is error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those whom we are certain are nonentities. What does not exist is in its nonexistence secure from suffering.
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Indeed it is better to postpone, lest either we complete too little by hurrying, or wander too long in completing it.
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It is our care for the helpless, our practice of loving kindness, that brands us in the eyes of those who oppose us.
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But all the other frenzies of passions-impious both toward the bodies and toward the sexes-beyond the laws of nature, we banish not only from the threshold, but from all shelter of the Church, because they are not sins, but monstrosities.