Tertullian Quotes
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The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.'
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For what war should we not be fit and eager, even though unequal in numbers, we who are so willing to be slaughtered-if, according to that discipline of ours, it was not more lawful to be slain than to slay?
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Let the emperor make war on heaven; let him lead heaven captive in his triumph; let him put guards on heaven; let him impose taxes on heaven! He cannot. . . . He gets his sceptre where he first got his humanity; his power where he got the breath of life.
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Let women paint their eyes with tints of chastity, insert into their ears the word of God, tie the yoke of Christ around their necks, and adorn their whole persons with the silk of sanctity and the damask of devotion.
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We ourselves, though we're guilty of every sin, are not just a work of God: we're image. Yet we have cut ourselves off from our Creator in both soul and body. Did we get eyes to serve lust, the tongue to speak evil, ears to hear evil, a throat for gluttony, a stomach to be gluttony's ally, hands to do violence, genitals for unchaste excesses, feet for an erring life? Was the soul put in the body to think up traps, fraud, and injustice? I don't think so.
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For those women sin against God when they rub their skin with ointments, stain their cheeks with rouge, and make their eyes prominent with antimony. To them, I suppose, the artistic skill of God is displeasing!
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Keep always in mind the rule of faith which I profess and by which I bear witness that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are inseparable from each other, and then you will understand what is meant by it. Observe now that I say the Father is other distinct, the Son is other, and the Spirit is other. This statement is wrongly understood by every uneducated or perversely disposed individual, as if it meant diversity and implied by that diversity a separation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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Where our work is, there let our joy be.
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A holy woman may be beautiful by the gift of nature, but she must not give occasion to lust. If beauty be hers, so far from setting it off she ought rather to obscure it.
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I revere the fullness of His Scripture, in which He manifests to me both the Creator and creation. In the gospel moreover, I discover a Minister and Witness of the Creator, even His Word.
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The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
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See how these Christians love one another.
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He is a man, who is to be a man; the fruit is always present in the seed.
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There is strife between God s ways and human ways; damned by you, we are absolved by God.
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Patience is God's nature.
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The pleasure of those who injure you lies in your pain. Therefore they will suffer if you take away their pleasure by not feeling pain.
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Illustrious confessors of Jesus Christ, a Christian finds in prison the same joys as the prophets tasted in the desert. Call it not a dungeon, but a solitude. When the soul is in heaven, the body feels not the weight of fetters; it carries the whole man along with it.
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Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.
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How many men of rank (to say nothing of common people) have been delivered from devils, and healed of diseases!
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Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God.
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The first reaction to truth is hatred.
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All the Scriptures give clear proof of the Trinity, and it is from these that our principle is deduced...the distinction of the Trinity is quite clearly displayed.
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What has Athens to do with Jerusalem.
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We say, and we say openly, and while ye torture us, mangled and gory we cry out, "We worship God through Christ!" Believe Him a man: it is through Him and in Him that God willeth Himself to be known and worshipped.