Top 100 Francis Schaeffer Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of the doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government.”

— Francis Schaeffer

52. “Sometimes the greatest deterrent to a great marriage is believing you have a perfect marriage.”

— Francis Schaeffer

53. “The spiritual battle, the loss of victory, is always in the thought-world.”

— Francis Schaeffer

54. “There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or compassion.”

— Francis Schaeffer

55. “We must stress that the basis for our faith is neither experience nor emotion but the truth as God has given it in verbalized, prepositional form in the Scripture and which we first of all apprehend with our minds.”

— Francis Schaeffer

56. “I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.”

— Francis Schaeffer

57. “A compassionate open home is part of Christian responsibility, and should be practiced up to the level of capacity.”

— Francis Schaeffer

58. “Things, things, things. Always more things, and success is seen as the abundance of things.”

— Francis Schaeffer

59. “As my son Frankie put it, Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm: They began – I am my shepherd. Then – Sheep are my shepherd. Then – Everything is my shepherd. Finally – Nothing is my shepherd.”

— Francis Schaeffer

60. “Christianity believes that God has created an external world that is really there; and because He is a reasonable God, one can expect to be able to find the order of the universe by reason.”

— Francis Schaeffer

61. “Some psychological and sociological conditioning occurs in every man’s life and this affects the decisions he makes. But we must resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning.”

— Francis Schaeffer

62. “Reformation is a return to the sound doctrine of the Bible. Revival is the practice of that sound doctrine under the power of the Holy Spirit.”

— Francis Schaeffer

63. “The Christian in the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.”

— Francis Schaeffer

64. “The soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important.”

— Francis Schaeffer

65. “Our trusting the Lord does not mean that there are not times of tears. I think it is a mistake as Christians to act as though trusting the Lord and tears are not compatible.”

— Francis Schaeffer

66. “Preaching the gospel without the Holy Spirit is to miss the entire point of the command of Jesus Christ for our era. In the area of “Christian activities” or “Christian service,” how we are doing it is at least as important as what we are doing.”

— Francis Schaeffer

67. “The difference between Christian thinking and the non-Christian philosopher has always been at this point. The non-Christian philosopher has always said that man is normal now, but biblical Christianity says he is abnormal now.”

— Francis Schaeffer

68. “You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand.”

— Francis Schaeffer

69. “Any denomination or church group that forsakes inerrancy will end up shipwrecked. It is impossible to prevent the surrender of other important doctrinal teachings of the Word of God when inerrancy is gone.”

— Francis Schaeffer

70. “Eve doubted God, and I as a child of God am now to be exactly the opposite: I am to believe him. Eve doubted, and mankind in revolt doubts God. To believe him, not just when I accept Christ as Savior, but every moment, one moment at a time: this is the Christian life, and this is true spirituality.”

— Francis Schaeffer

71. “There are two main reasons why we may not be bringing forth the fruit we should. It may be because of ignorance, because we may never have been taught the meaning of the work of Christ for our present lives.”

— Francis Schaeffer

72. “Christ’s crucifixion was on a hill, by a road, where everybody who passed by could not only see his pain, but also his shame. It was not done in a shadow, hidden away somewhere.”

— Francis Schaeffer

73. “When my conscience under the Holy Spirit makes me aware of a specific sin I should at once call that sin sin and bring it consciously under the blood of Christ.”

— Francis Schaeffer

74. “Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.”

— Francis Schaeffer

75. “The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God’s world because God made us to be creative.”

— Francis Schaeffer

76. “Reality is not meant to be only creedal, though the creeds are important. Reality is to be experienced, and experienced on the basis of a restored relationship with God through that finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross.”

— Francis Schaeffer

77. “The overall way of thinking in the United States has shifted away from basic Biblical values, and the media share in the responsibility for this change.”

— Francis Schaeffer

78. “The one thing the media abhors almost without exception is anyone who takes a firm stand on any issue out of religious principle, unless their stand happens to coincide with their expressed views.”

— Francis Schaeffer

79. “Modern multiple divorce is rooted in the fact that many are seeking in human relationships what human relationships can never give. Why do they have multiple divorce, instead of merely promiscuous affairs? Because they are seeking more than merely sexual relationship.”

— Francis Schaeffer

80. “If you want a significant man, with absolutes, morality, and meaning, then you must have what the Bible insists upon – that God will judge men justly, and they will not be able to raise their voices because of the base upon which He judges them.”

— Francis Schaeffer

81. “Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.”

— Francis Schaeffer

82. “In God’s world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual.”

— Francis Schaeffer

83. “The ordinary Christian with the Bible in his hand can say that the majority is wrong.”

— Francis Schaeffer

84. “The inward area is the first place of loss of true Christian life, of true spirituality, and the outward sinful act is the result.”

— Francis Schaeffer

85. “The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.”

— Francis Schaeffer

86. “What we, the Christian community, have to do is to refuse men the right to ravish our land, just as we refuse them the right to ravish our women; to insist that somebody accepts a little less profit by not exploiting nature.”

— Francis Schaeffer

87. “The church’s or Christian group’s methods are as important as its message.”

— Francis Schaeffer

88. “This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.”

— Francis Schaeffer

89. “I have come to the conclusion that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin as we should or as our forefathers did.”

— Francis Schaeffer

90. “If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.”

— Francis Schaeffer

91. “Christianity is the greatest intellectual system the mind of man has ever touched.”

— Francis Schaeffer

92. “There would have been no Bach had there been no Luther.”

— Francis Schaeffer

93. “In the flesh rather than the work of the Spirit, it is easy to say we are showing holiness and it only be egotistic pride and hardness.”

— Francis Schaeffer

94. “Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship – and not as ends in themselves.”

— Francis Schaeffer

95. “When a man comes under the blood of Christ, his whole capacity as a man is refashioned. His soul is saved, yes, but so are his mind and his body. True spirituality means the lordship of Christ over the total man.”

— Francis Schaeffer

96. “Humanism is not wrong in its cry for sociological healing, but humanism is not producing it.”

— Francis Schaeffer

97. “To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at those points where there is a cost in our doing so, is to push the next generation in the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us.”

— Francis Schaeffer

98. “We must not only be True. We must be Beautiful.”

— Francis Schaeffer

99. “Christian art today should be twentieth-century art.”

— Francis Schaeffer

100. “There is no use of Evangelicalism seeming to get larger and larger, if at the same time appreciable parts of Evangelicalism are getting soft at that which is the central core, namely the Scriptures.”

— Francis Schaeffer