Top 250 Elisabeth Elliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “It’s only in the cross that we can begin to harmonize this seeming contradiction between suffering and love.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

202. “St. Augustine said, “The very pleasures of human life men acquire by difficulties.” There are times when the entire arrangement of our existence is disrupted and we long then for just one ordinary day – seeing our ordinary life as greatly desirable, even wonderful, in the light of the terrible disruption that has taken place. Difficulty opens our eyes to pleasures we had taken for granted.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

203. “The gate is narrow but not the life. The gate opens out into largeness of life.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

204. “God might have given Adam another man to be his friend, to walk and talk and argue with if that was his pleasure. But Adam needed more than the companionship of the animals or the friendship of a man. He needed a helper, specially designed and prepared to fill that role. It was a woman God gave him, a woman, “meet,” fit, suitable, entirely appropriate for him, made of his very bones and flesh.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

205. “A woman ought to be honest with a man who shows interest in her.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

206. “You can create a climate for him according to your attitude, and this is part of your job as a wife. The home you make and the atmosphere of that home is the world he comes back to from the world of his work. Let it be a place of beauty and peace.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

207. “I seek the lessons God wants to teach me, and that means that I ask why.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

208. “A man will be as much of a gentleman as a woman requires.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

209. “Think of this- we may live together with Him here and now, a daily walking with Him who loved us and gave Himself for us.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

210. “Are you afraid? Remember the “fear nots” of the Bible.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

211. “We never know what God has up His sleeve. You never know what might happen; you only know what you have to do now.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

212. “It is a merciful Father who strips us when we need to be stripped, as the tree needs to be stripped of its blossoms. He is not finished with us yet, whatever the loss we suffer, for as we loose our hold on visible things, the invisible become more precious – where our treasure is, there will our hearts be.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

213. “We are not asked to SEE,” said Amy. “Why need we when we KNOW?” We know – not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. “It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is ‘hard to trust’ when things are entirely bewildering?”

— Elisabeth Elliot

214. “A few clear pronouncements on one side and a few honest questions on the other had, in a matter of minutes, shown me that life was not going to be as simple, ever again, as I had thought.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

215. “But God has set no traps for us. Quite the contrary. He has summoned us to the only true and full freedom.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

216. “Things which sound like platitudes become vital, living and powerful when you have to learn them in dark tunnels.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

217. “Experience had quickly taught her that she could not survive the storms without the anchor of the constraining love of Christ and what she called the “Rock-counsciousness” of the promise given her, “He goeth before.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

218. “If he had loved her he would have pursued her.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

219. “A Christian sees all men as made in the image of God. All are sinners too, which means that the image is marred, but it is a divine image nonetheless, capable of redemption and therefore to be held in honor.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

220. “Nothing has done more damage to the Christian view of life than the hideous notion that those who are truly spiritual have lost all interest in the world and its beauties.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

221. “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should enjoy things made for us to enjoy. What is not at all fitting or proper is that we should set our hearts on them. Temporal things must be treated as temporal things – received, given thanks for, offered back, but enjoyed. They must not be treated like eternal things.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

222. “God will never disappoint us. He loves us and has only one purpose for us : holiness, which in His kingdom equals joy.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

223. “No woman who has not learned to master herself can be trusted to submit willingly to her husband. And that word willingly means that she does not merely resign herself to something she cannot avoid. It means that by an act of her own will she gives herself.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

224. “Worship is an act, and this takes discipline.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

225. “I don’t want anybody treating me as a “person” rather than as a woman. Our sexual differences are the terms of our life, and to obscure them in any way is to weaken the very fabric of life itself. When they are lost, we are lost.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

226. “As a bird easily comes to terms with the necessity of bearing wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear up the bird – up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom – so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling – wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

227. “There is a whole world of difference between those who look only for their own happiness in this world and those who know their true happiness lies in the will of God.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

228. “The love of God is not a sentiment. It is a willed and inexorable love that will command nothing less than the very best for us. The love of God wills our joy. I think of the love of God as being synonymous with the will of God.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

229. “I don’t pray when I’m in the mood anymore then I wash dishes when I’m in the mood. Pray ’til you feel like praying.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

230. “Some day, even you will see that there’s sense in this. Your suffering is never for nothing.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

231. “So if you get all hung up, thinking now is this thing from God or is it from Satan? Is this the voice of God or the voice of Satan? Stop worrying about it. You don’t really need to sort that out because here’s a case where the thorn was in a sense given by God as a messenger of Satan.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

232. “All creatures, with two exceptions that we know of, have willingly taken the places appointed to them. The Bible speaks of angels who rebelled and therefore were cast down out of heaven, and of the fall of man.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

233. “Well, that’s what faith is about, isn’t it? If you really believe that somebody loves you then you trust them. The will of God is love. And love suffers. That’s how we know what.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

234. “We need Jesus Christ, our refuge, our fortress, the stronghold of my life. It takes desolation to teach us our need of Him.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

235. “A willing acceptance of all that God assigns and a glad surrender of all that I am and have constitute the key to receiving the gift of a quiet heart. Whenever I have balked, the quietness goes. It is restored, and life immeasurably simplified, when I have trusted and obeyed.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

236. “Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all. In unforeseen events let me not forget that all are sent by You.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

237. “MAKE us masters of ourselves,” wrote the prison reformer Sir Alexander Paterson, “that we may be the servants of others.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

238. “We had a little brass plate over the front doorbell that said “Christ is the head of this home, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

239. “In order to be a disciple we must deny ourselves – this is to exercise authority over our own spirit. We must take up the cross – this is to submit to Christ’s authority. And we must follow – this is continued obedience. This is the road not to confinement, to bondage, to a stunted or arrested development, but to total personal freedom. It means not death but life, not a narrowly circumscribed life but “abundant” life.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

240. “Each time God gives us a hard lesson He desires also to give us Himself. If we open our hands to receive the lesson we open our hearts to receive Him, and with Himself His vision to see the glory in the surrender, whether of small things like self-esteem and reputation, or bigger things like a career and a home.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

241. “When stormy winds against us break stablish and reinforce our will; O hear us for Thine own Name’s sake, hold us in strength, and hold us still. Still as the faithful mountains stand, through the long, silent years of stress; so would we wait at Thy right hand in quietness and steadfastness.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

242. “I have found, to depression as well. 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.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

243. “It’s He who was the Word before the foundation of the world, suffering as a lamb slain. And He has a lot up His sleeve that you and I haven’t the slightest idea about now. He’s told us enough so that we know suffering is never for nothing.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

244. “15 Well that sounds pretty brave and strong, doesn’t it? But listen to the last stanza, “But not of us this strength, O Lord, and not of us this constancy. Our trust is Thine eternal Word, Thy presence our security.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

245. “Does our faith rest on having prayers answered as we think they should be answered, or does it rest on that mighty love that went down into death for us?”

— Elisabeth Elliot

246. “The same God who urges us to obey also furnishes the desire as well as the strength to do so. Our part is to exercise our wills.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

247. “The Bible’s answers are never to be separated from the God of the Bible.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

248. “You either believe God knows what He’s doing or you believe He doesn’t. You either believe He’s worth trusting or you say He’s not. And then, where are you? You’re at the mercy of chaos not cosmos. Chaos is the Greek word for disorder. Cosmos is the word for order. We either live in an ordered universe or we are trying to create our own reality.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

249. “Although I have not found intellectual satisfaction, I have found peace. The answer I say to you is not an explanation but a person, Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

250. “Jesus comes into our lives in these places of need. And if we recognize Him because of our need, then we can receive whatever it is that He is prepared to offer us whether it’s the grace of forgiveness or the patience to wait for the answer to that prayer or healing or serenity in the midst of the worst times of your life. Whatever it is, you can receive it and say, “Thank You, Lord.”

— Elisabeth Elliot