Top 300 Philip Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The late Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical American author, wrote: “For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But – often with tears in their eyes – they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere.”

— Philip Yancey

152. “Make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about – like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.”

— Philip Yancey

153. “Prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.”

— Philip Yancey

154. “Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.”

— Philip Yancey

155. “Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.”

— Philip Yancey

156. “Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.”

— Philip Yancey

157. “What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.”

— Philip Yancey

158. “Be careful,” warned Nietzsche, “lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon.” I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.”

— Philip Yancey

159. “Maybe God isn’t trying to tell us anything specific each time we hurt. Pain and suffering are part and parcel of our planet, and Christians are not exempt.”

— Philip Yancey

160. “The first step in helping a suffering person is to acknowledge that the pain is valid, and worthy of a sympathetic response.”

— Philip Yancey

161. “Prayer enters the pool of God’s love and widens outward.”

— Philip Yancey

162. “The only hope for any of us, regardless of our particular sins, lies in a ruthless trust in a God who inexplicably loves sinners, including those who sin differently than we do.”

— Philip Yancey

163. “Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of.”

— Philip Yancey

164. “Jesus tended to honor the losers of this world, not the winners. Our modern culture extravagantly rewards beauty, athletic skill, wealth, and artistic achievement, qualities which seemed to impress Jesus not at all.”

— Philip Yancey

165. “The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.”

— Philip Yancey

166. “Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.”

— Philip Yancey

167. “Is God somehow responsible for the suffering of this world? In this indirect way, yes. But giving a child a pair of ice skates, knowing that he may fall, is a very different matter from knocking him down on the ice.”

— Philip Yancey

168. “Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on His own terms, regardless of the personal cost.”

— Philip Yancey

169. “Prayer allows me to admit my failures, weaknesses, and limitations to One who responds to human vulnerability with infinite mercy.”

— Philip Yancey

170. “That, at least, is the vision of the church in the New Testament: a colony of heaven in a hostile world. Dwight L. Moody said, “Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian.”

— Philip Yancey

171. “A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.”

— Philip Yancey

172. “Love is an overarching style of relating to another.”

— Philip Yancey

173. “I have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.”

— Philip Yancey

174. “It seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for His entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism.”

— Philip Yancey

175. “The Quakers have a saying: “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.” To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me. Those conversations are what led to the title of this book. Although God’s grace is as amazing as ever, in my divided country it seems in vanishing supply.”

— Philip Yancey

176. “The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.”

— Philip Yancey

177. “Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.”

— Philip Yancey

178. “If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer.”

— Philip Yancey

179. “Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.”

— Philip Yancey

180. “You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it.”

— Philip Yancey

181. “God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.”

— Philip Yancey

182. “Stanley Hauerwas, named “America’s best theologian” by Time magazine, summed up the problem: “I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world.”

— Philip Yancey

183. “The Cross of Christ may have overcome evil, but it did not overcome unfairness. For that, Easter is required.”

— Philip Yancey

184. “Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping that somehow, sometime, somewhere, that person will be cured.”

— Philip Yancey

185. “A pilgrim is a fellow-traveler on the spiritual journey, not a professional guide.”

— Philip Yancey

186. “Be salt, and a little bit of salt keeps the whole society from going rancid.”

— Philip Yancey

187. “There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to. We are judged by the righteousness of the Christ who lives within, not our own.”

— Philip Yancey

188. “I think God isn’t interested in intervening every time some little bad thing happens. God is interested in getting the message of good news and love and comfort and hope across through people like us, ordinary people, or extraordinary people like Bono.”

— Philip Yancey

189. “Jesus was not crucified for being a good citizen, for being just a little nicer than everyone else. The powers of his day correctly saw him and his followers as subversives because they took orders from a higher power than Rome or Jerusalem. What would a subversive church look like in the modern United States?”

— Philip Yancey

190. “I would far rather convey grace than explain it.”

— Philip Yancey

191. “We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate choice of their own mothers.”

— Philip Yancey

192. “On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons, he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out evil, and even overcame death.”

— Philip Yancey

193. “Evil’s greatest triumph may be its success in portraying religion as an enemy of pleasure when, in fact, religion accounts for its source: every good and enjoyable thing is the invention of a Creator who lavished gifts on the world.”

— Philip Yancey

194. “Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness – and certainly not love.”

— Philip Yancey

195. “All of us in the church need “grace-healed eyes” to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us.”

— Philip Yancey

196. “Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”

— Philip Yancey

197. “Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.”

— Philip Yancey

198. “Don’t judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear his name.”

— Philip Yancey

199. “Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job, the Lord of the universe has many things to manage, and in the midst of my self-pity I would do well to contemplate for a moment God’s own point of view.”

— Philip Yancey

200. “The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.”

— Philip Yancey