Top 280 A.W. Tozer Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.”

— A.W. Tozer

252. “See how God winked at weaknesses and overlooked failures as He poured upon His servants grace and blessing untold. Let it be Abraham, Jacob, David, Daniel, Elijah, or whom you will; honor followed honor as harvest follows the seed. The man of God set his heart to exalt God above all; God accepted his intention as fact and acted accordingly. Not perfection, but holy intention made the difference.”

— A.W. Tozer

253. “This, this is the God we adore, Our faithful, unchangeable Friend, Whose love is as great as His power, And neither knows measure nor end. ‘Tis Jesus, the first and the last, Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home; We’ praise Him for all that is past, And trust Him for all that’s to come. Joseph Hart.”

— A.W. Tozer

254. “Americans live no longer in homes, but in theaters. The members of many families hardly know each other, and the face of some popular TV star is to many wives as familiar as that of their husbands. Let no one smile. Rather should we weep at the portent. It will do no good to wrap ourselves in the Stars and Stripes for protection. No nation can long endure whose people have sold themselves for bread and circuses.”

— A.W. Tozer

255. “I want to emphasize and lay upon your conscience to practice anticipatory prayer, because battles are lost before they are fought.”

— A.W. Tozer

256. “The Holy Spirit is God’s purifying messenger to us, bringing the water and the fire that will make us white as snow. Let us trust Him, let us obey Him, let us receive Him.”

— A.W. Tozer

257. “Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested:.”

— A.W. Tozer

258. “Whoever defends himself will have himself for his defense, and he will have no other; but let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for his defender no less than God Himself.”

— A.W. Tozer

259. “Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him, the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”

— A.W. Tozer

260. “Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies. We cover our deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to whisper “mystery.”

— A.W. Tozer

261. “God may allow His servant to succeed when He has disciplined him to a point where he does not need to succeed to be happy. The man who is elated by success and cast down by failure is still a carnal man. At best his fruit will have a worm in it.”

— A.W. Tozer

262. “These are the “poor in spirit.” They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is what the word “poor” as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

— A.W. Tozer

263. “It is one thing to have a lot of information about God, but it is another thing to bask in the warmth and reality of His presence.”

— A.W. Tozer

264. “Some Christians have come to the point where they have talked their way about as far as they can get. They will never get any further with their head, so they might as well put it to rest. It is the hungry heart that will finally penetrate the veil and encounter God, but this will be in the lonely recesses of the heart, far from things in the natural world. This is where God will meet us – far from the maddening crowd.”

— A.W. Tozer

265. “It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table.”

— A.W. Tozer

266. “Prayer at its best is the expression of the total life.”

— A.W. Tozer

267. “Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control.”

— A.W. Tozer

268. “Oh, that we might yearn for the knowledge and Presence of God in our lives from moment to moment, so that without human cultivation and without toilsome seeking there would come upon us this enduement that gives meaning to our witness!”

— A.W. Tozer

269. “The true Christian has an insatiable appetite for Christ and the things of Christ, while the world has no such appetite.”

— A.W. Tozer

270. “The truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”

— A.W. Tozer

271. “Some have the idea that God’s purpose is to make our lives more tolerable here on earth. That rather cheapens what Christ did on the cross. If all He wanted to do was make our lives tolerable, then He could have done it in a variety of other ways. God’s supreme purpose for us is to make us like His Son, Jesus Christ. If we understand that everything happening to us is to make us more Christlike, it will solve a great deal of anxiety in our lives.”

— A.W. Tozer

272. “The man that believes will obey; failure to obey is convincing proof that there is not true faith present. To attempt the impossible God must give faith or there will be none, and He gives faith to the obedient heart only. Where real repentance is, there is obedience; for repentance is not only sorrow for past failures and sins, it is a determination to begin now to do the will of God as He reveals it to us.”

— A.W. Tozer

273. “If you wish to be miserable, think much about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, and what people think of you. – Charles Kingsley.”

— A.W. Tozer

274. “We who preach the gospel must not think of ourselves as public relations agents sent to establish good will between Christ and the world. We must not imagine ourselves commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of sports or modern education. We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum. God offers life, but not an improved old life. The life He offers is life out of death.”

— A.W. Tozer

275. “He and I in that bright glory, One deep joy shall share. Mine to be forever with Him, And His that I am there.”

— A.W. Tozer

276. “This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon.”

— A.W. Tozer

277. “Put that down in capital letters – that the Holy Spirit is not only a Being having another mode of existence, but He is Himself a Person, with all the qualities and powers of personality. He is not matter, but He is substance.”

— A.W. Tozer

278. “Be Thou exalted over my reputation. Make me ambitious to please Thee even if as a result I must sink into obscurity and my name be forgotten as a dream.”

— A.W. Tozer

279. “The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand.”

— A.W. Tozer

280. “Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the Creating Personality, God.”

— A.W. Tozer

281. “Other before me have gone much father into holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large, it is yet real and it may be those who can light their candle at its flame.”

— A.W. Tozer

282. “As long as Christ sits on the mediatorial throne every day is a good day and all days are days of salvation.”

— A.W. Tozer

283. “God wants to please you. He is pleased when you are His child, when you’re surrendered, when your will is His will and His will is yours, when you are not in rebellion and not seeking your own will. God loves to please His people.”

— A.W. Tozer

284. “He is the sweetest, most understanding and wonderful Teacher in the world, and He never panics anybody. It is sin that does that.”

— A.W. Tozer

285. “Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”

— A.W. Tozer

286. “Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image. The flesh whimpers against the rigor of God’s inexorable sentence and begs like Agag for a little mercy, a little indulgence of its carnal ways. It is no use. We can get a right start only by accepting God as He is and learning to love Him for what He is.”

— A.W. Tozer

287. “The Holy Spirit wrote 150 psalms and in those psalms He celebrates the wonders of God’s creation.”

— A.W. Tozer

288. “The evil habit of seeking God-and effectively prevents us from finding God in full revelation. In the “and” lies our great woe. If we omit the “and” we shall soon find God, and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.”

— A.W. Tozer

289. “We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety. This is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.”

— A.W. Tozer

290. “The “layman” need never think of his humbler task as being inferior to that of his minister. Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.”

— A.W. Tozer