Top 80 Os Guinness Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I live before the audience of One-before others I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to prove.”

— Os Guinness

2. “We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone. We are not called first to special work but to God. The key to answering the call is to be devoted to no one and to nothing above God himself.”

— Os Guinness

3. “Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It’s the power to do what you ought.”

— Os Guinness

4. “In our day it’s worse to judge evil than to do evil.”

— Os Guinness

5. “Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.”

— Os Guinness

6. “In working out our callings, we are to perform for one audience, the audience of One.”

— Os Guinness

7. “Calling is a ‘yes’ to God that carries a ‘no’ to the chaos of modern demands. Calling is the key to tracing the story line of our lives and unriddling the meaning of our existence in a chaotic world.”

— Os Guinness

8. “Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.”

— Os Guinness

9. “The problem with Western Christians is not that they aren’t where they should be but that they aren’t what they should be where they are.”

— Os Guinness

10. “God is the ultimate source of all power. All human power is therefore derived, limited, unstable and transient.”

— Os Guinness

11. “The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, “Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can do without?“4.”

— Os Guinness

12. “If Jesus Christ is the head of the church and hence the source and goal of its entire life, true growth is only possible in obedience to Him. Conversely, if the church becomes detached from Jesus Christ and His Word, it cannot grow however active and successful it may seem to be.”

— Os Guinness

13. “The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism. God the Holy Spirit can turn the situation around in five minutes.”

— Os Guinness

14. “The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.”

— Os Guinness

15. “Christ is the only way to God, but there are as many ways to Christ as there are people who come to Him.”

— Os Guinness

16. “The age of the Internet, it is said, is the age of the self and the selfie. The world is full of people full of themselves. In such an age, “I post, therefore I am.”

— Os Guinness

17. “If there is no Caller, there are no callings – only work.”

— Os Guinness

18. “People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for.”

— Os Guinness

19. “Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.”

— Os Guinness

20. “Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.”

— Os Guinness

21. “The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.”

— Os Guinness

22. “Idolatry is huge in the Bible, dominant in our personal lives, and irrelevant in our mistaken estimations.”

— Os Guinness

23. “For while we may debate our freedom to choose, there is no doubt that we are not free not to choose.”

— Os Guinness

24. “Jesus never spoke to two people the same way, and neither should we. Every single person is unique and individual and deserves an approach that respects that uniqueness.”

— Os Guinness

25. “Man’s love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.”

— Os Guinness

26. “Behind every civilization lies a vision and a worldview, and none is greater or more lasting than the strength of its vision.”

— Os Guinness

27. “Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.”

— Os Guinness

28. “God is the God of truth. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. The Scriptures are the truth. The gospel is the word of truth. Conversion is a turnaround triggered by truth. Discipleship is the way of life that is living in truth. Confession is a realignment with the truth. Spiritual growth is life formation through the power of the Spirit of truth. And the Last Judgment is the final vindication and restoration of truth for humanity and for the very cosmos itself.”

— Os Guinness

29. “Part of the glory of the Christian faith is that at its heart is a God who is a person. “He who is,” the father of Jesus Christ and our father, is infinite, but he is also personal. The Christian faith therefore places a premium on the absolute truthfulness and trustworthiness of God, so understanding doubt is extremely important to a Christian.”

— Os Guinness

30. “Atheism thrives on bad religion.”

— Os Guinness

31. “In terms of distance, the prodigal’s pigsty is the farthest point from home; in terms of time, the pigsty is the shortest distance to the father’s house.”

— Os Guinness

32. “Too often we forget that the great men of faith reached the heights they did only by going through the depths.”

— Os Guinness

33. “Negative freedom is freedom from – freedom from oppression, whether it’s a colonial power or addiction to alcohol oppressing you. You need to be freed from negative freedom. Positive freedom is freedom for, freedom to be. And that’s what’s routinely ignored today.”

— Os Guinness

34. “An “open mind” can be an “empty head,” and “tolerance” can be indistinguishable from believing nothing. These are no help in finding honest answers to honest and important questions.”

— Os Guinness

35. “If the Christian faith is true, it is true even if no one believes it, and if it is not true, it is false even if everyone believes it. The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.”

— Os Guinness

36. “At the supreme moment of his dying Jesus so identified himself with men and the depths of their predicament and agony that no man can now sink so low that God has not gone lower.”

— Os Guinness

37. “Everybody is born free. Not everybody is worthy of freedom.”

— Os Guinness

38. “We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone.”

— Os Guinness

39. “What is undeniable is that when comforts and convenience sap our energies and idealism, inactivity secretes sloth in to our minds like a poison in the blood.”

— Os Guinness

40. “Whereas our grandparents lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes, we think and act as if we have swallowed Gallup polls.”

— Os Guinness

41. “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

— Os Guinness

42. “Followers of Jesus who count the cost and are willing to take up their crosses after him must have broad shoulders.”

— Os Guinness

43. “Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to “break in” the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.”

— Os Guinness

44. “The Christianization of the modern world is leading to the modernization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus. Similarly, as we shall see, the Christianization of America has led to the Americanization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus.”

— Os Guinness

45. “Needless to say, the dynamic of the resurrection and a God who cannot be buried for long is the dynamic of a child’s jack-in-the-box writ large in golden cosmic letters.”

— Os Guinness

46. “Either we serve God and use money or we serve money and use God.”

— Os Guinness

47. “What we also need is a constructive overarching vision of Christian engagement in today’s advanced modern world, one that is shaped by faith in God and a Christian perspective rather than by current wisdom, and one that can inspire Christians to move out with courage to confront the best and worst that we may encounter.”

— Os Guinness

48. “As the early church boasted rightly, the message of Jesus is both simple enough for a child to paddle in and deep enough for an elephant to swim in.”

— Os Guinness

49. “We human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.”

— Os Guinness

50. “The Christian faith is not true because it works. It works because it is true.”

— Os Guinness