Top 35 Geoffrey Wood Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him.”

— Geoffrey Wood

2. “Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.”

— Geoffrey Wood

3. “If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.”

— Geoffrey Wood

4. “With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana – the fear of Fear itself.”

— Geoffrey Wood

5. “Teach them the shame that tells the lie, “I am unforgivable,” when the truth is, “I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control.” Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.”

— Geoffrey Wood

6. “Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.”

— Geoffrey Wood

7. “No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves.”

— Geoffrey Wood

8. “Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.”

— Geoffrey Wood

9. “Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.”

— Geoffrey Wood

10. “Once a man discovers that his obedience is primarily for others’ sake, that every miracle that ever amazed happened because of someone’s obedience somewhere, that properly understood, his obedience prepares the way for His visitation, well, then we run up against the appalling result of attentive servants gladly going about His bidding without the slightest hesitation. Indeed, in the worse cases, they run where He says run with reckless abandon.”

— Geoffrey Wood

11. “That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives – gratitude.”

— Geoffrey Wood

12. “And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.”

— Geoffrey Wood

13. “When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.”

— Geoffrey Wood

14. “You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be ‘undemocratic’.”

— Geoffrey Wood

15. “In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.”

— Geoffrey Wood

16. “I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.”

— Geoffrey Wood

17. “Remember, philosophically speaking, Americans are mongrels – practical materialists but with a dreamy streak of divine approval.”

— Geoffrey Wood

18. “In general, Americans would walk a mile uphill in the rain to avoid pain, unless the walk could be shorter and level and the day sunny, which they’d prefer.”

— Geoffrey Wood

19. “Faith is an act whereby they learn their God.”

— Geoffrey Wood

20. “And I’m glad to see that all three clients are male. Not that the females can’t be corrupted, I’ve just always found the males more amenable to temptation. The males have always had all the power, so that does much to explain it. As they say: Easy pickings.”

— Geoffrey Wood

21. “As a rule, Americans are big on that word “choice” and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.”

— Geoffrey Wood

22. “Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten.”

— Geoffrey Wood

23. “Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy” – well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.”

— Geoffrey Wood

24. “With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook – that prissy little virtue, Temperance – for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.”

— Geoffrey Wood

25. “Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.”

— Geoffrey Wood

26. “They want explanation, not faith; God gives them faith as the explanation.”

— Geoffrey Wood

27. “Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.”

— Geoffrey Wood

28. “But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.”

— Geoffrey Wood

29. “If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.”

— Geoffrey Wood

30. “Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional – the more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.”

— Geoffrey Wood

31. “At the same time, they find their mind-god has played a trick on them. For mind is a part of the very system it has closed around it, and being inside, there is no reason to think any statement made by some part concerning the whole has any validity. Mind was caused by the material universe, if mind is right. But only the greater can accurately define the lesser, never the other way round, so if mind is right, mind would never know.”

— Geoffrey Wood

32. “First of all, don’t ever let them try to define that word “happiness” for themselves. They can’t and that’s precisely what we never want them to realize. Keep it a vague bright mist hovering about their heads. Locate it securely at the end of implausible rainbows. Hide it snugly in some corner of their thoughts they rarely visit.”

— Geoffrey Wood

33. “The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.”

— Geoffrey Wood

34. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would’ve worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would’ve then better lead them on to happiness.”

— Geoffrey Wood

35. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.”

— Geoffrey Wood

36. “They scold their own hearts but it actuates no real change, only deepens the wound. But they can’t look away from it. Thus, by paralyzing their Present, we beat The Adversary on His home turf. And loop after loop, the depressed haunt and harrow themselves, sometimes for years, when they have only, for a brief moment, to look away from themselves, to look up.”

— Geoffrey Wood

37. “Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.”

— Geoffrey Wood