Top 60 Christian Wiman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.”

— Christian Wiman

2. “Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.”

— Christian Wiman

3. “What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.”

— Christian Wiman

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

— Christian Wiman

5. “Art is so often better at theology than theology is.”

— Christian Wiman

6. “To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence.”

— Christian Wiman

7. “Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.”

— Christian Wiman

8. “It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, “maturity,” suffering.”

— Christian Wiman

9. “It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, ‘maturity,’ suffering. You must become as little children, Jesus said, a statement that is often used to justify anti-intellectualism and the renunciation of reason, but which I take actually to mean that we must recover this sense of wonder, this excess of spirit brimming out of the body.”

— Christian Wiman

10. “If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand.”

— Christian Wiman

11. “So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.”

— Christian Wiman

12. “To say that one must live in uncertainty doesn’t begin to get at a tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs FLEXIBILITY.”

— Christian Wiman

13. “There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.”

— Christian Wiman

14. “Silence is the language of faith. Action – be it church or charity, politics or poetry – is the translation.”

— Christian Wiman

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

— Christian Wiman

16. “And still: some who cry the name of Christ Live more remote from love Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.”

— Christian Wiman

17. “Nature poets can’t walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.”

— Christian Wiman

18. “Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self.”

— Christian Wiman

19. “Faith is nothing more – but how much this is – than a motion of the soul toward God. It is not belief. Belief has objects – Christ was resurrected, God created the earth – faith does not. Even the motion of faith is mysterious and inexplicable: I say the soul moves “toward” God, but that is only the limitation of language. It may be God who moves, the soul that opens for him. Faith is faith in the soul.”

— Christian Wiman

20. “At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.”

— Christian Wiman

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

— Christian Wiman

22. “It’s just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.”

— Christian Wiman

23. “All too often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.”

— Christian Wiman

24. “Mandelstam – his gift and the untamable nature of it – was like a thorn in Stalin’s brain.”

— Christian Wiman

25. “To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence. All those trivial, frittering anxieties acquire, even if only briefly, a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such.”

— Christian Wiman

26. “Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures. Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change.”

— Christian Wiman

27. “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.”

— Christian Wiman

28. “If faith requires you to foreclose on an inspiration, surely it is not faith.”

— Christian Wiman

29. “Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety.”

— Christian Wiman

30. “To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.”

— Christian Wiman

31. “We should be suspicious when God’s call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.”

— Christian Wiman

32. “There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.”

— Christian Wiman

33. “It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.”

— Christian Wiman

34. “It is why every single expression of faith is provisional – because life carries us always forward to a place where the faith we’d fought so hard to articulate to ourselves must now be reformulated, and because faith in God is, finally, faith in change.”

— Christian Wiman

35. “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.”

— Christian Wiman

36. “Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his – Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva – though their work is more “urgent” than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.”

— Christian Wiman

37. “One must learn to be in unknowingness without being proud of it.”

— Christian Wiman

38. “Mandelstam’s style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.”

— Christian Wiman

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

— Christian Wiman

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

— Christian Wiman

41. “To finish a work of art is to be exiled from it.”

— Christian Wiman

42. “The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.”

— Christian Wiman

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

— Christian Wiman

44. “I can’t think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam’s urgency, but it’s a different country and a different time, and I don’t think it would make much sense to say that this is something that’s “missing” from contemporary American poetry.”

— Christian Wiman

45. “When life is thriving in us, we crave to get beyond it: experience that takes us out of ourselves, poetry that articulates a shape and space for the inexpressible, prayer that obliterates self-consciousness for the sake of God.”

— Christian Wiman

46. “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.”

— Christian Wiman

47. “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.”

— Christian Wiman

48. “If to be an artist is to be someone upon whom nothing is lost, as Henry James said, then it follows that to be an artist is to be in some permanent sense professionally detached.”

— Christian Wiman

49. “Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by three qualities: humility, which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward – or at least outward – even in your lowest moments. Such doubt is painful – more painful, in fact, than any of the other forms – but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying.”

— Christian Wiman

50. “What I do know, or sense, is that within the love that once opened up the world to you – from the birth of a child to meeting your mate – is a key that can let you back into the world when that love is gone.”

— Christian Wiman