Quotes by American Authors - Page 3288

Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Believe what you believe and it will be, believe what others believe and they will consume you!
Stanley Victor Paskavich
At such times, the heart of man turns instictively towards his Maker. In prosperity, and whenever there is nothing to injure or make him afraid, he remembers Him not, and is ready to defy Him; but place him in the midst of dangers, cut him off from human aid, let the grave open before him, then it is, in the time of his tribulation, that the scoffer and unbelieving man turns to God for help, feeling there is no other hope, or refuge, or safety, save in his protecting arm.
Solomon Northup
We must transcend the illusion that money or power has any bearing on our worthiness as children of God.
Steve Maraboli
The greatest thing a man can do in this world, is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.
Orison Swett Marden
It may not always be easy, convenient or politically correct to stand for truth and right, but it is the right thing to do. Always.
M. Russell Ballard
If you are a Christian, you are not a citizen of this world trying to get to heaven; you are a citizen of heaven making your way through this world.
Vance Havner
In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who says there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University, page 214)
Albert Einstein
Imagine that Jesus is calling you today. He extends a second invitation to accept His Father's love. And maybe you answer, "Oh, I know that. It's old hat."And God answers, 'No, that's what you don't know. You don't know how much I love you. The moment you think you understand is the moment you do not understand. I am God, not man. You tell others about Me - your words are glib. My words are written in the blood of My only Son. The next time you preach about My love with such obnoxious familiarity, I may come and blow your whole prayer meeting apart.Did you know that every time you tell Me you love Me, I say thank you?
Brennan Manning
I pray for you, that all your misgivings will be melted to thanksgivings. Remember that the shadow a thing casts often far exceeds the size of the thing itself (especially if the light be low on the horizon) and though some future fear may strut brave darkness as you approach, the thing itself will be but a speck when seen from beyond. Oh that He would restore us often with that 'aspect from beyond,' to see a thing as He sees it, to remember that He dealeth with us as with sons.
Jim Elliot
Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.
Wendell Berry
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
H.L. Mencken
And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.
Sherman Alexie
Cynicism is when a small mind and a hurt heart rejects the hope, love, and truth of a big and caring God.
Jayce O'Neal
It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality or it would not be reasonable.
Donald Miller
God is alive, real, and wants to heal you in every aspect of your life where you are hurting.
Robert A. Schuller
I've always been spiritual but I've never had a proper context, and it took me a while to find the proper context. It's hard to realize you can have any kind of relationship with God you want... and so I now have a punk rock relationship with God
Billy Corgan
God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge. He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with Himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them in the world of spirits. (King Follett Discourse)
Joseph Smith Jr.
Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
Anne Lamott
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is,
Walt Whitman
Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.
Denis Johnson
...God created the world in six days. On the seventh day, he rested. On the eighth day, he started getting complaints. And it hasn't stopped since.
James Scott Bell
We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.
John Ortberg Jr.
Sometimes the strongest thing you will ever do will be to let go of someone. It will be painful, you will suffer guilt, and you will second-guess yourself, but for your own sanity and quality of life, there will come a time where you hand them to God, with your love, and trust Him to be who and what He is. May our Lord comfort you.
Lee Goff
The fact of God is necessary for the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.
A.W. Tozer
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.
Elisabeth Elliot
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.
Frederick Buechner
The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.
Marcus J. Borg
Fortunately, God made all varieties of people with a wide variety of interests and abilities. He has called people of every race and color who have been hurt by life in every manner imaginable. Even the scars of past abuse and injury can be the means of bringing healing to another. What wonderful opportunities to make disciples!
Charles R. Swindoll
The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart.
John Eldredge
Dreams are tawdry when compared with the leading of God, and not worthy of the aura of wonder we usually surround them with. God only doeth wonders. He does nothing else. His hand can work nothing less.
Jim Elliot
Women are delicate creatures. Fragile. Gentle. Made by God to be sheltered from the harshness of this world..Morgan MacDonnell
Teresa Medeiros
Before you came into my life, I believed that God had abandoned me. Now I know that He has blessed me beyond measure. ~Sir Bannor
Teresa Medeiros
A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.
Jodi Picoult
If there was a god, I'd still have both nuts.
Lance Armstrong
Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.
Sue Monk Kidd
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.]
James Madison
The humble sinner will sometimes be interpreted as one of the filthiest in the eyes of man yet immersed in the eyes of God, and this is due to the volition of honesty regarding his own corruption.
Criss Jami
The irony is that while God doesn't need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don't really want Him most of the time. He treasures us and anticipates our departure from this earth to be with Him-and we wonder, indifferently, how much we have to do for Him to get by.
Francis Chan
Where does your security lie? Is God your refuge, your hiding place, your stronghold, your shepherd, your counselor, your friend, your redeemer, your saviour, your guide? If He is, you don't need to search any further for security.
Elisabeth Elliot
It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job to love.
Billy Graham
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.
Carl Sandburg
Never allow your ego to diminish your ability to listen.
Gary Hopkins
If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if I had to choose between a faith that has stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naive faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time.
Gary Parker
The wizard [of Oz] says look inside yourself and find self. God says look inside yourself and find [the Holy Spirit]. The first will get you to Kansas. The latter will get you to heaven.Take your pick.
Max Lucado
God dances with the outcast.
Steven James
Jesus Christ came not to condemn you but to save you, knowing your name, knowing all about you, knowing your weight right now, knowing your age, knowing what you do, knowing where you live, knowing what you ate for supper and what you will eat for breakfast, where you will sleep tonight, how much your clothing cost, who your parents were. He knows you individually as though there were not another person in the entire world. He died for you as certainly as if you had been the only lost one. He knows the worst about you and is the One who loves you the most. If you are out of the fold and away from God, put your name in the words of John 3:16 and say, “Lord, it is I. I’m the cause and reason why Thou didst on earth come to die.” That kind of positive, personal faith and a personal Redeemer is what saves you. If you will just rush in there, you do not have to know all the theology and all the right words. You can say, “I am the one He came to die for.” Write it down in your heart and say, “Jesus, this is me—Thee and me,” as though there were no others. Have that kind of personalized belief in a personal Lord and Savior.
A.W. Tozer
If you place [your bet] with God, you lose nothing, even if it turns out that God does not exist. But if you place it against God, and you are wrong and God does exist, you lose everything.
Peter Kreeft
I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we're all going to do next. But I'm worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don't believe in God Bless America. I don't believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don't believe we're being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we really came together, if we really found a common humanity? The hitch is that you can't find a common humanity just because you have a common enemy. You have to find a common humanity because you believe that's true.
David Levithan
The Anatomy of Conflict:If there is no communication then there is no respect. If there is no respect then there is no caring. If there is no caring then there is no understanding. If there is no understanding then there is no compassion. If there is no compassion then there is no empathy. If there is no empathy then there is no forgiveness. If there is no forgiveness then there is no kindness. If there is no kindness then there is no honesty. If there is no honesty then there is no love. If there is no love then God doesn't reside there. If God doesn't reside there then there is no peace. If there is no peace then there is no happiness. If there is no happiness ----then there IS CONFLICT BECAUSE THERE IS NO COMMUNICATION!
Shannon L. Alder
Low self-esteem causes me to believe that I have so little worth that my response does not matter. With repentance, however, I understand that being worth so much to God is why my response is so important. Repentance is remedial work to mend our minds and hearts, which get bent by sin.
John Ortberg Jr.
We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.
Christopher Hitchens
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
Henry Miller
I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?
Jodi Picoult
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?
Annie Dillard
Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but in the heart prepared to wait trustfully and quietly on Him who has all things safely in His hands.
Elisabeth Elliot
I think the reason we sometimes have the false sense that God is so far away is because that is where we have put him. We have kept him at a distance, and then when we are in need and call on him in prayer, we wonder where he is. He is exactly where we left him.
Ravi Zacharias
God makes each one of us for the time into which we are born. He creates us for a purpose. Our job is to know Him well, discover what He created us to do, and then do it for all we're worth for the rest of our lives. Ask God to show you your purpose. He will answer.
Robin Lee Hatcher