Philip Yancey Quotes

Goodness cannot be imposed externally, from the top down; it must grow internally, from the bottom up.

Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.

God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.

Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.

Often, it seems, we're [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.

God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.

The Old Testament anticipates [Jesus] all the way through.

He (Job) did not seek the Giver because of His gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver.

O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice

Jesus was a master of grace: he attracted sinners and moral outcasts even as he offended the religious and responsible people of his day.

It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you've heard everything before and that you have nothing left to learn.

What you and I think about Jesus and how we respond to Him will determine our destiny for all eternity.

We whine about things we have little control over; we lament what we believe ought to be changed.

The point of the Book of Job is not suffering: where is God When It hurts? The prologue (chapters 1-2) dealt with that issue. The point of the Book of Job is faith: Where is Job when it hurts?

Who would complain if God allowed one hour of suffering in an entire lifetime of comfort? Why complain about a lifetime that includes suffering when that lifetime is a mere hour of eternity?

We can’t expect the nation to operate by Christian principles… but we can expect this of the church.

When he lived on earth, [Jesus] surrounded himself with ordinary people who misunderstood him, failed to exercise much spiritual power, and sometimes behaved like churlish schoolchildren.

Never do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God's secret will; rather, he healed them.

Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else.

[...]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?

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.

I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.

... learning humility is a prerequisite for grace.

Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.

If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

Augustine started from God's grace and got it right, Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God.

Prayer is - not just bowing your head a few times a day, it pervades all of life.

Prayer is a place where God and humans meet.

Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

God does not accept me conditionally, on the basis of my performance, but bestows his love and forgiveness freely, despite my innumerable failures.

I ask God most often that we would be an unbroken line of Christians until Christ shall return.

Dependence, humility, simplicity, cooperation, and a sense of abandon are qualities greatly prized in the spiritual life, but extremely elusive for people who live in comfort.

Be salt, and a little bit of salt keeps the whole society from going rancid.

Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.

We should be asking: How do we respond to a post-Christian society?

All of the images of Jesus and of the kingdom are small things: be a light in the darkness.

The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

We should do whatever we can to cut through the scum that has grown on our understanding and rediscover freshness.

You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it

The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.

... we need to reclaim the "goodnewness" of the gospel, and the best place to start is to rediscover the good news ourselves.

If God doesn't want something for me, then I shouldn't want it either.

Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.

We human beings instinctively regard the seen world as the "real" world and the unseen world as the "unreal" world, but the Bible calls for almost the opposite.

...to see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes.

When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.