Interesting ?? Quotes

Oh God, I don't love you, I don't even want to love you, but I want to want to love you!
- Teresa of Avilla


When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust not certainty.
- Flannery O'Connor

If knowing answers to life's questions is absolutely necessary to you, then forget the journey. You will never make it, for this is a journey of unknowables - of unanswered questions, enigmas, incomprehensibles, and most of all, things unfair.
- Madame Jeanne Guyon

I was once asked to sign Christianity Today magazines statement of faith "without doubt or equivocation." I had to tell them that I can barely sign my own name without doubt or equivocation.
- Philip Yancey - Christian Author

When good things happen, I accept them as gifts from God, worthy of thanksgiving. When bad things happen, I do not take them as necessarily sent from God - I see evidence in the Bible to the contrary - and I find in them no reason to divorce God. Rather, I trust that God can use even those bad things for my benefit. That, at least, is the goal toward which I strive.
- Philip Yancey

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
- John Donne

To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.
- Walker Percy

Some things are loved because they are worthy; some things are worthy because they are loved.
- Ian Pitt-Watson

As a journalist, I have a tendency to distance myself to observe my surroundings like some invisible person who does not enter into but glides in and out of the scene, taking notes all the while.
- Philip Yancey

It's dark at the foot of the lighthouse.
- German proverb

Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear him, do not in fact believe in him but in those who have taught them that God exists. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, any anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-idea, not in God.
- Miguel De Unamuno

We receive enlightenment only in proportion as we give ourselves more and more completely to God by humble submission and love. We do not first see then act: we act, then see...And that is why the man who waits to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
- Thomas Merton

It's much easier to act your way into feelings than to feel your way into actions.
- Philip Yancey

If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God that you have found.
- Thomas Merton

God gives us just enough to seek him, and never enough to fully find him. To do more would inhibit our freedom, and our freedom is very dear to God.
- Ron Hassen

I keep hitting a glass ceiling, for though I excel at doubt and honest self-appraisal I see a frustrating lack of progress in qualities like joy and love. And just when I think I'm becoming more patient and gentle, I get cut off after waiting on hold for twenty minutes on the telephone and start pounding the desk with my fist.
- Philip Yancey

The real 'work' of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.
- Henri Nouwen

There are three coping mechanisms children learn in order to survive a dysfunctional setting: Don't Talk, Don't Trust, and Don't Feel. Later, as adults, these same survivors find themselves incapable of sustaining an intimate relationship and must unlearn the pattern of indifference. Christian counselors tell me that wounded Christians relate to God in the same way. Reacting against a strict upbringing or feeling betrayed by God, they squelch all passion and fall back on a more formal, less personal faith.
- Philip Yancey

If Saul proves that 'To obey is better than sacrifice,' then David proves that relationship is even better than obedience.
- Unknown

5 stages of spiritual growth:
1) Loving ourselves for our own sake
2) Loving God for our own sake, in view of what God does for us
3) Loving God for God's sake, unselfishly
4) Loving ourselves for God's sake, in awareness of God's great love for us
- Bernard of Clairveaux
5) Loving others for God's sake
- Philip Yancey

In a fundamental human paradox, the more a person reaches out beyond herself, the more she is enriched and deepened, and the more she grows in likeness to God. On the other hand, the more a person "incurves," to use Luther's word, the less human she becomes. Our need to give is as great as anyone's need to receive.
- Philip Yancey

Inspection stickers used to have printed on the back 'Drive carefully - the life you save may be your own.' That is the wisdom of men in a nutshell. What God says, on the other hand, is 'The life you save is the life you lose.' In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself; and only a life given away for love's sake is a life worth living. To bring his point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of men's wisdom, he was a perfect fool, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of himself is laboring under not a cross but a delusion.
- Frederick Buechner