“Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“God does not seem impressed by size or power or wealth. Faith is what he wants, and the heroes who emerge are heroes of faith, not strength or wealth.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what appropriate to say in a prayer. God can "handle" my unsuppressed rage. I may well find that my vindictive feelings need God's correction - but only by taking those feelings to God will I have the opportunity for correction and healing.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“the promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“They [Old Testament] taught me about Life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“We whine about things we have little control over; we lament what we believe ought to be changed.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“we persevere because we believe rewards will come.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“La fidelidad implica aprender a confiar que, más allá del perímetro de la oscuridad, Dios aún reina y no nos ha abandonado, no importa lo que parezca.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“Growing up in evangelical churches, I got my pictures of the Christian life exclusively from Paul who, I would suggest, is hardly a “typical” Christian. Paul had a miraculous conversion experience, had a history of miracles and supernatural interventions, and—apart from Romans 7, bless that chapter—apparently had an easy time living out the lofty ideals of the Christian life, or at least an easier time than I have. Once Paul understood something intellectually, his emotions tended to line up in good order. Trying to imitate Paul (which he encouraged) is, in my experience, no simpler than trying to imitate Jesus.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“In a sense, Job must replay the original test of the garden of Eden, with the bar raised higher. Living in paradise, Adam and Eve faced a best-case scenario for trusting God, who asked so little of them and showered down blessings. In a living hell, Job faces the worst-case scenario: God asks so much, while curses rain down on him.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind—these are all a drive toward [loving the One] who rings our heart like a bell. —ABRAHAM HESCHEL”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“I am forced to reexamine. Thomas Merton’s words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular: There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible—until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves… Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it? Have we ceased to fight it? Then perhaps our reading is no longer serious. For most people, the understanding of the Bible is, and should be, a struggle: not merely to find meanings that can be looked up in books of reference, but to come to terms personally with the stark scandal and contradiction in the Bible itself… Let us not be too sure we know the Bible just because we have learned not to be astonished at it, just because we have learned not to have problems with it.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“At times, God's history seems to operate on an entirely different plane than ours...Exodus identifies by name the two Hebrew midwives who helped save Moses' life, but it does not bother to record the name of the Pharaoh ruling Egypt (an omission that has baffled scholars ever since).”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“Where did our sense of beauty and pleasure come from? That seems to me a huge question—the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. The Teacher’s answer is clear: A good and loving God naturally would want his creatures to experience delight, joy, and personal fulfillment. G. K. Chesterton credits pleasure, or eternity in his heart, as the signpost that eventually directed him to God:”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“never live as though God does not exist.” Or, stated positively, “Always live in awareness of God’s existence.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
“In the context of real life, the Bible seems refreshingly whole, an honest reflection on humanity in relation to the sacred and the profane.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from The Bible Jesus Read
Philip Yancey
Born place: Atlanta, Georgia, The United States
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“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.
People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]
“This great and sombre stage is set for something
more worthy than that,” said he. “It is fortunate
for this community that I am not a criminal.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from His Last Bow
“Control is part of faking it”
― Alex Flinn, quote from Breathing Underwater
“What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food!”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Edible Woman
“I raised my hands, trying to shush her.
"Don't shush me," she said, eyes blazing. "I hate being shushed.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from Skybreaker
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A Long Way GoneBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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