Christian Wiman Quotes

Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.

To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence.

Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.

I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond.

I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.

Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.

I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.

Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.

Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.

I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.

God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.

One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.

Christ is not alive now because he rose from the dead two thousand years ago. He rose from the dead two thousand years ago because he is alive right now.