Quotes from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“I would far rather convey grace than explain it.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“That, at least, is the vision of the church in the New Testament: a colony of heaven in a hostile world. Dwight L. Moody said, “Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“By striving to prove how much they deserve God’s love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don’t deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Jesus declared that we should have one distinguishing mark: not political correctness or moral superiority, but love.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at the table in God’s family.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“All of us in the church need “grace-healed eyes” to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Grace is shockingly personal. As Henri Nouwen points out, 'God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate choice of their own mothers.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping that somehow, sometime, somewhere, that person will be cured.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Jesus’ death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Eugene Peterson hace un contraste entre Agustín y Pelagio, dos teólogos del siglo IV opuestos entre sí. Pelagio era educado, cortés, convincente y le caía bien a todo el mundo. Agustín había derrochado su juventud en la inmoralidad, tenía una extraña relación con su madre y se conseguía muchos enemigos. Sin embargo, hizo de la gracia su punto de partida y las cosas le salieron bien, mientras que Pelagio comenzaba por el esfuerzo humano y se descarriaba.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Like everyone else, evangelicals have a right to present arguments on all the issues, but the moment we present them as part of some “Christian” platform we abandon our moral high ground.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

“That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus’ word Abba. God may be the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human father.”
― Philip Yancey, quote from What's So Amazing About Grace?

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Popular quotes

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― Kate Griffin, quote from The Neon Court

“وعلى من يبتسم الرز
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لماذا يكتبون في العصور المظلمة
بحبرٍ خفي؟
هل يعرف جمال كراكاس
كم تنورةً للوردة؟
لماذا تلسعني البراغيث
ورقباء الأدب؟”
― Pablo Neruda, quote from The Book of Questions

“We were watching a sitcom, I don't remember which. There were many of them at the time that all could be lumped together under the title of Funny Minority and the White Guy.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dexter By Design

“Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.”
― Colson Whitehead, quote from Apex Hides the Hurt

“The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
― Stanley Kunitz, quote from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz

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