Top 80 Os Guinness Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Feast of Patrick, Bishop of Armagh, Missionary, Patron of Ireland, c.460 The evidence for Christian truth is not exhaustive, but it is sufficient. Too often, Christianity has not been tried and found wanting – it has been found wanting, and not tried.”

— Os Guinness

52. “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

53. “Culturally, one of the best arguments we can make is, wait and see.”

— Os Guinness

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

— Os Guinness

55. “All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it?”

— Os Guinness

56. “For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots – the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.”

— Os Guinness

57. “The modern world is highly secular in certain parts, and nowhere more than in the world of the educated elites. Such people are notoriously “tone deaf” and their natural habitat is “a world without windows,” as Weber and Berger have described them.”

— Os Guinness

58. “We may at times be unemployed, but no one ever becomes uncalled.”

— Os Guinness

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

— Os Guinness

60. “One of the key places where sociology should be used is in analyzing ‘the world’ of our times, so that we can be more discerning. To resist the dangers of the world, you have to recognize the distortions and seductions of the world.”

— Os Guinness

61. “In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.”

— Os Guinness

62. “Calling is more than purely cultural, but it is also more than purely personal. Discover the meaning of calling and you discover the heart of the gospel itself.”

— Os Guinness

63. “After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity.”

— Os Guinness

64. “Balaam’s ass is the patron saint of apologists. Madness, as we shall see, is an appropriate term for the unreality of unbelief.”

— Os Guinness

65. “When we learn the wrong lessons of history, evil is reinforced rather than restrained- particularly when we use the injuries of the past to serve the interests of the future and ignore the injustices of the present.”

— Os Guinness

66. “This challenge means that each of us as apologists must examine our own hearts. Have we loved enough to listen, or is it that we love to hear the sound of our own answers? Are we really arguing for Christ, or are we expressing our need always to be right?”

— Os Guinness

67. “For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.”

— Os Guinness

68. “Creative persuasion is a matter of being biblical, not of being either modern or postmodern.”

— Os Guinness

69. “In 1916, President Wilson drafted the speech in which he declared, “It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be.” His Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in the margin: “Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama.“6 That.”

— Os Guinness

70. “But the fact is that the Bible itself is the grandest of grand stories, yet it prizes truth and reason without being modernist, and it prizes countless stories within its overall story without being postmodern either. In short, the Bible is both rational and experiential, propositional as well as relational, so that genuinely biblical arguments work in any age and with any person.”

— Os Guinness

71. “The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.”

— Os Guinness

72. “All human beings are alike in seeking happiness. Where they differ is in the objects from which they seek it and the strength they have to reach the objects they desire.”

— Os Guinness

73. “The inner, the real and the unseen are irrelevant in today’s world. All that counts is appearance, and the world of consumerism has lost no time in catering to every need, and then creating even more, in this burgeoning market of the appearance.”

— Os Guinness

74. “In the biblical view the issue is not modern versus postmodern. Both these views are partly right, and both are finally wrong. Nor is it rational argument versus story, or reason versus imagination. In fact it is not either-or at all. The deep logic of God’s truth can be expressed in both stories and arguments, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans.”

— Os Guinness

75. “Money rather than monarchy and plutocracy rather than theocracy are the chief threats to republicanism today.”

— Os Guinness

76. “In short, contrary to the founders – and in ways they do not realize themselves – Americans today are heedlessly pursuing a vision of freedom that is short-lived and suicidal. Once again, freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster.”

— Os Guinness

77. “There still remains only God to protect man against man. Either we will serve him in spirit and in truth or we shall enslave ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous idol that we have made with our own hands to our own image and likeness. Etienne Gilson, 20th century.”

— Os Guinness

78. “There are no foolproof methods of persuasion, and those that come closest are coercive and dangerous because they override the will rather than convince the mind.”

— Os Guinness

79. “Just as to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, so in the age of science and technology, everything is a scientific and technical matter to be solved by scientific and technical means.”

— Os Guinness

80. “Our task is to focus on our individual callings in engaging with the world, to trust that others are following theirs too, and to leave to God the masterminding of the grand outcome.”

— Os Guinness

81. “The despicable modern resort to playing the victim card or charging one’s opponent with being “phobic” in one way or another was not for Paul. If.”

— Os Guinness

82. “Evangelicalism can only remain evangelical if it is passionately serious about truth and theology.”

— Os Guinness

83. “We must also and always be discerning about the spirit of the age in any generation, which today means squarely facing the seductions of technique.”

— Os Guinness

84. “The trouble is that, as modern people, we have too much to live with and too little to live for. Some feel they have time but not enough money; others feel they have money but not enough time. But for most of us, in the midst of material plenty, we have spiritual poverty.”

— Os Guinness

85. “The United States is at a turning point because of a decreasing influence of faith .”

— Os Guinness

86. “What Socrates called the “unexamined life” that is “not worth living” now seems to be the life more people have slipped into than ever before.”

— Os Guinness

87. “Much of the greatness of the human spirit can be seen in our passionate pursuit of knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, perfection, and love. At the same time, few things are so haunting as the stories of the very greatest seekers falling short. Leonardo da Vinci’s magnificent failures point to a very personal entry point to the wonder of calling – when something more than human seeking is needed if seeking is to be satisfied, then calling means that seekers themselves are sought.”

— Os Guinness