Since yesterday was Bible Sunday (see my post here), I’ve decided to post a catena (Lat. for “chain”) of quotations about the Bible; it is not patristic, especially given the presence of Asimov of all people! If you want to read more of my thoughts about the Bible, I’ve got a list of posts at the bottom. Here we go (in vaguely chronological order):
Lord, inspire us to read your Scriptures and meditate on them day and night. We beg you to give us real understanding of what we need, that we in turn may put is precepts into practice. Yet we know that understanding and good intentions are worthless, unless rooted in your graceful love. So we ask that the words of Scriptures may also be not just signs on a page but channels of grace into our hearts. –Origen
Wherever you go, always have God before your eyes; whatever you do, have [before you] the testimony of the Holy Scriptures. –St. Antony the Great
All of Holy Scripture is bound together, and it has been united by one Spirit. It is like a single chain, one link attached to another, and when you have taken one, another hangs from it. –St. Jerome
For my part I declare resolutely and with all my heart that if I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend. I would rather write in this way than impose a single true meaning so explicitly that it would exclude all others, even though they contained no falsehood that could give me offence. –St. Augustine
Constant meditation upon the holy Scriptures will perpetually fill the soul with incomprehensible ecstasy and joy in God. –St. Isaac the Syrian
If you do not love the blessed and truly divine words of Scripture, you are like the beasts that have neither sense nor reason. –St. Nilus of Antioch
Read this book. It contains everything. You ask for love? Read this book of the Crucified. You wish to be good? Read the book of the Crucified, which contains everything good. –Savonarola
The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold on me. –Martin Luther
We owe to Scripture the same reverence that we owe to God. –John Calvin
Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. –39 Articles of the Anglican Religion
Unity must be according to God’s holy word, or else it were better war than peace. We ought never to regard unity so much — that we forsake God’s word for her sake. –Hugh Latimer
Time can take nothing from the Bible. It is the living monitor. Like the sun, it is the same in its light and influence to man this day which it was years ago. It can meet every present inquiry and console every present loss. –Richard Cecil
The Bible was not given to increase our knowledge. It was given to change lives. –Dwight L. Moody
The English Bible, the first of national treasure and the most valuable thing this world affords. –King George V
Sir Arthur St. Clare … was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A print reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads a Bible and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his and finds we have no arms and legs … –Fr. Brown by GK Chesterton
The Character of the Christian’s experience of god is determined by the reality of God who has spoken his word and who continues to speak his Word. –John Woodhouse
I have found nothing in science or space exploration to compel me to throw away my Bible or to reject my Saviour, Jesus Christ, in whom I trust. –Walter F. Burke
The infliction of literalism on us by fundamentalists who read the Bible without seeing anything but words is one of the great tragedies of history. –Isaac Asimov
The church may not judge the Scriptures, selecting and discarding from among their teachings. But Scripture under Christ judges the church for its faithfulness to his revealed truth. –Montreal Declaration of Anglican Essentials
Classic Christianity never asserts either scripture against tradition or tradition against scripture. Rather, it understands itself as the right remembering of the earliest testimony of scripture to God’s self-disclosure in history. –Thomas C. Oden
Scripture became written in order that the events attested in preaching might be more accurately preserved and remembered. A written text was obviously more stable than an oral tradition, which might always be controverted by another alleged oral tradition. A text, if drafted faithfully, did not distort memory but stabilized it in writing. The written Word of canonized scripture was assumed to consistent with its anteceding oral expressions, and its transmission stood under the protection of the Holy Spirit, who accompanied the apostolic witness. –Thomas C. Oden
The Gospels were not just written to describe events in the past. They were written to show that those events were relevant, indeed earth-shattering, worldview-challenging, and life-changing in the present. –Tom Wright
God’s Word does not breed quarrels and divisions. It brings the simple truth and love of Jesus, who heals and unites. It brings salvation. –John Michael Talbot
the Bible is the unique, infallible, written Word of God, but the word of God is not just the Bible. If we try to dignify the Bible by saying false things about it — by simply equating the word of God with it — we do not dignify it. Instead we betray its content by denying what it says about the nature of the word of God. –Dallas Willard
The Bible is a finite, written record of the saving truth spoken by the infinite, loving god, and it reliably fixes the boundaries of everything he will ever say to humankind. –Dallas Willard
In the modern world we seldom looked at the Bible as a composite picture revealing a cosmic vision of the world; we were too busy with the details to see God’s narrative whole. We were too concerned with analyzing its parts, with literary criticism, historical verification, and theological systems. –Robert E. Webber
To suggest that only Christians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been and are capable of understanding the Bible is to deny the Bible’s universality — that it is addressed to all people of all times, not only to the learned of a particular time — and consequently to reduce Christianity to a kind of modern gnosticism. –Boniface Ramsey
A faithful reading of scripture . . . means that we seek to understand how the passages that we are reading at the moment, and the questions that we are presently asking, fit into this forgiving, healing, and life-giving drama that has been initiated by God himself. –Edith M. Humphrey
If you have the Spirit without the Word, you blow up. If you have the Word without the Spirit, you dry up. If you have both the Word and the Spirit, you grow up. –I never wrote down the name
Pocket Scroll posts on the Bible:
How are we to interpret the Bible?
The Allure of Eastern Orthodoxy
John Wesley on Spiritual Reading
Killing Enemies & Bashing Babies on Rocks: Reading the Difficult Psalms, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2
Why Read the Bible? Unspiritual Reason #1: Books
Unspiritual Reason to Read the Bible #2: Everything Other Than Books
The Third Unspiritual Reason to Read the Bible
Classically Christian 
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