The Treasury of Religious and Spiritual Quotations: Words to Live By »

Representative of all major religious creeds, The Treasury of Religious & Spiritual Quotationsis a one-stop storehouse of answers as well as inspiration. It offers comfort and the keys to introspection. And it is indispensable for the writer or speaker who seeks to illustrate a point. Somewhere in these pages is the right quote to put a problem or situation in perspective, to counter despair, to offer guidance and hope for those who seek change and personal improvement.

Covering the entire range of human experience, this collection includes eternal truths and current ear-catching aphorisms, and is the only authoritative, contemporary encyclopedic source for the best that has been said and written about matters of the spirit.

BookList

This volume is based on Ralph L. Woods' 1966 compilation, "The World Treasury of Religious Quotations". The editors have deleted some dated quotations and added approximately 1,000 new passages to the original 5,500 excerpts The attractive volume is arranged by subject. Each passage is followed by a citation containing author, source, and date. Some of the quoted authors include Sophocles, St. Thomas Aquinas, Annie Dillard, Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, Carl Jung, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Carl Sagan, Rabbi Kushner, Flannery O'Connor, Paul Newman, Amy Grant, and Elizabeth Dole. Among the hundreds of subjects covered are aggression and violence, alcohol, art, atheism, Buddhism, capital punishment, clergy, the cross, doubt, the family, guilt, ideals, laughter, metaphysics, peace of mind, the pope, vice, and war. Unfortunately, the volume contains no indexing Although this volume is useful (in that it reprints and updates an out-of-print publication), it is lacking in comparison with "Draper's Book of Quotations for the Christian World" (Tyndale, 1992), which is only five dollars more in price. "Draper's" is twice as large, more international in scope, contains numbered entries, and has both author and subject indexes. Unfortunately, it does not cite sources as does "The Treasury" For public and academic libraries, as well as private collections, "Draper's" is recommended over "The Treasury of Religious & Spiritual Quotations".