Top 250 Elisabeth Elliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Our Heavenly Healer often has to hurt us in order to heal us. We sometimes fail to recognize His mighty love in this, yet we are firmly held always in the Everlasting Arms.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

102. “If your faith rests in your idea of how God is supposed to answer your prayers, your idea of heaven here on earth or pie in the sky or whatever, then that kind of faith is very shaky and is bound to be demolished when the storms of life hit it. But if your faith rests on the character of Him who is the eternal I AM, then that kind of faith is rugged and will endure.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

103. “Everything if given to God can become your gateway to joy.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

104. “Loneliness itself is material for sacrifice. The very longings themselves can be offered to Him who understands perfectly. The transformation into something He can use for the good of others takes place only when the offering is put into his hands.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

105. “Modesty means to be free from undue familiarity, from indecency, from lewdness, pure in thought and conduct. Speaking of modest apparel, it means decent, seemly. The opposite of modesty is conceit, boldness, immodesty, brazenness, lewdness.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

106. “The world cries for men who are strong; strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

107. “We can’t really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

108. “The heart which has no agenda but God’s is the heart at leisure from itself. Its emptiness is filled with the Love of God. Its solitude can be turned into prayer.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

109. “Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

110. “He is always doing something – the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

111. “We have ample evidence that the Lord is able to guide. The promises cover every imaginable situation. All we need to do is to take the hand he stretches out.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

112. “Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

113. “The only basis of peace is the cessation of the conflict of two wills: my will vs God’s.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

114. “I will offer to Him both my tears and my exultation. Nothing we offer to Him will be lost.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

115. “What I ought to do and what I feel like doing are seldom the same thing.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

116. “There is something that pretends to be christianity which is mostly mood. The measure of its faith is merely the measure of its feeling.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

117. “My heart was saying, “Lord, take away this longing, or give me that for which I long.” The Lord was answering, “I must teach you to long for something better.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

118. “If you are married, then accept that. Accept the husband that God has given you. If you are single, accept your singleness and take it as if today was the last day of your life. Don’t be looking constantly to the future.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

119. “Nothing trains and teaches so powerfully as love. Love attracts. it does not coerce. If the aim of parents is to teach their children to love God they must show their love for Him by loving each other and loving the children.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

120. “If all struggles and sufferings were eliminated, the spirit would no more reach maturity than would the child.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

121. “The deepest lessons come out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

122. “A little quiet reflection will remind me that yes to God always leads in the end to joy.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

123. “Faith is not a feeling. Faith is willed obedience in action.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

124. “Faith’s most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

125. “The man whose eye is single for the glory of Another can be trusted.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

126. “All our problems are theological ones, William Temple said. All of them have to do with our relationship to God and his to us, and this is precisely why it makes sense to come to God with them.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

127. “It is when we come to the Lord in our nothingness, our powerlessness and our helplessness that He then enables us to love in a way which, without Him, would be absolutely impossible.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

128. “God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful – “severe mercies” at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts desire except to give us something better.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

129. “It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

130. “Prostitutes dress obviously, so as to draw attention. It’s their business, isn’t it? The last thing that a Christian woman is thinking of is being like a prostitute.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

131. “I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts. Its easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence – easier sometimes than to wait patiently.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

132. “Some of God’s greatest mercies are in his refusals. He says no in order that he may, in some way we cannot imagine, say yes.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

133. “Virginity is something that can be offered to God.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

134. “If God, like a father, denies us what we want now it is in order to give us some far better thing later on. The will of God, we can rest assured, is invariably a better thing.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

135. “Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone to accept, His lordship.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

136. “The Bible doesn’t explain everything necessary for our intellectual satisfaction, but it explains everything necessary for our obediance.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

137. “Lord, break the chains that hold me to myself; free me to be Your happy slave – that is, to be the happy foot washer of anyone today who needs his feet washed, his supper cooked, his faults overlooked, his work commended, his failure forgiven, his griefs consoled or his button sewed on. Let me not imagine that my love for You is very great if I am unwilling to do for a human being something very small.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

138. “But the question to precede all others, which finally determines the course of our lives is What do I really want? Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises? Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?”

— Elisabeth Elliot

139. “We are not adrift in chaos. To me that is the most fortifying, the most stabilizing, the most peace-giving thing that I know about anything in the universe. Every time that things have seemingly fallen apart in my life, I have gone back to those things that do not change. Nothing in the universe can ever change those facts. He loves me. I am not at the mercy of chance.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

140. “You yourself will be given light in exchange for pouring yourself out for the hungry; you yourself will get guidance, the satisfaction of your longings, and strength, when you “pour yourself out,” when you make the satisfaction of somebody else’s desire your own concern;.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

141. “Have we the humility to thank our Father for the gift of pain?”

— Elisabeth Elliot

142. “But, in the words of a Portuguese proverb, “God writes straight with crooked lines”, and He is far more interested in getting us where He wants us to be than we are in getting there. He does not discuss things with us. He leads us faithfully and plainly as we trust Him and simply do the next thing.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

143. “Wait. Wait on God. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t expect anything until the declaration is clear and forthright... resist the temptation to trifle with other people’s feelings.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

144. “Failure means nothing now, only that it taught me life.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

145. “Insistence that both lead means there won’t be any dance.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

146. “Christ is sufficient. We do not need “support groups” for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

147. “To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then and ‘be safe’?” That’s the only alternative, really. But locking ourselves up and never facing another person won’t fix what’s really going on in our souls.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

148. “And so it often is. Faith, prayer, and obedience are our requirements. We are not offered in exchange immunity and exemption from the world’s woes. What we are offered has to do with another world altogether.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

149. “God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

150. “Jesus never pussyfooted.”

— Elisabeth Elliot