Top 160 Richard J. Foster Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The tongue is our most powerful weapon of manipulation. A frantic stream of words flows from us because we are in a constant process of adjusting our public image. We fear so deeply what we think other people see in us that we talk in order to straighten out their understanding.”

— Richard J. Foster

52. “If worship does not change us it has not been worship.”

— Richard J. Foster

53. “The needed change within us is God’s work, not ours. The demand is for an inside job, and only God can work from the inside. We cannot attain or earn this righteousness of the kingdom of God: it is a grace that is given.”

— Richard J. Foster

54. “As Richard Foster explains, “Though silence sometimes involves the absence of speech, it always involves the act of listening. Simply to refrain from talking, without a heart listening to God, is not silence.”1.”

— Richard J. Foster

55. “Grace saves us from life without God-even more it empowers us for life with God.”

— Richard J. Foster

56. “The person who does not seek the kingdom first does not seek it at all, regardless of how worthy the idolatry that he or she has substituted for it.”

— Richard J. Foster

57. “Over-consumption is a cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask the moral questions.”

— Richard J. Foster

58. “Martin Luther declares that the life of the Christian should be one of daily repentance. Daily we confess, daily we repent, daily we “turn, turn, ’til we turn ’round right.” The Prayer of Tears is the primary aid to our turning.”

— Richard J. Foster

59. “Life with God will overflow any attempts to compartmentalize or contain it. It is not just for those who are ‘spiritually inclined.’ We are made to live with God at the very center of our lives, transforming our thoughts, actions, decisions, relationships, vocations, communities, and social structures.”

— Richard J. Foster

60. “Prayer is more than thoughts and feelings expressed in words. It is the opening of mind and heart – our whole being to God our Abba Father. It is Divine Union.”

— Richard J. Foster

61. “To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. Resentments cannot be held with the same tenacity when we enter his gracious light.”

— Richard J. Foster

62. “Thomas Merton says, “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!”2.”

— Richard J. Foster

63. “When we determine to dwell on the good and excellent things in life, we will be so full of those things that they will tend to swallow our problems.”

— Richard J. Foster

64. “Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.”

— Richard J. Foster

65. “Simplicity, then, is getting in touch with the divine center.”

— Richard J. Foster

66. “But the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will buy them from you for a price: I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.”

— Richard J. Foster

67. “When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world’s demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame?”

— Richard J. Foster

68. “Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we received as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety.”

— Richard J. Foster

69. “Jesus Christ and all the writers of the New Testament call us to break free of mammon lust and live in joyous trust... They point us toward a way of living in which everything we have we receive as a gift, and everything we have is cared for by God, and everything we have is available to others when it is right and good. This reality frames the heart of Christian simplicity. It is the means of liberation and power to do what is right and to overcome the forces of fear and avarice.”

— Richard J. Foster

70. “Prayer is simply saying “thank you, bless you, praise you.””

— Richard J. Foster

71. “In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in “muchness” and “manyness,” he will rest satisfied. Psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked, “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.”1.”

— Richard J. Foster

72. “My dearest Lord, be thou a bright flame before me, a guiding star above me, a smooth path beneath me, a kindly shepherd behind me, today and for evermore. – St. Columba of Iona.”

— Richard J. Foster

73. “Adoration is the spontaneous yearning of the heart to worship, honor, magnify, and bless God. We ask nothing but to cherish him. We seek nothing but his exaltation. We focus on nothing but his goodness.”

— Richard J. Foster

74. “Today, O Lord, I yield myself to you. May your will be my delight today. May your way have perfect sway in me. May your love be the pattern of my living. – Richard J. Foster, Prayers from the Heart12.”

— Richard J. Foster

75. “Prayer involves transformed passions. In prayer, real prayer, we begin to think God’s thoughts after Him: to desire the things He desires, to love the things He loves, to will the things He wills.”

— Richard J. Foster

76. “Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we must experience the many little death of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial.”

— Richard J. Foster

77. “Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God’s great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it.”

— Richard J. Foster

78. “If we are silent when we should speak, we are not living the Discipline of silence. If we speak when we should be silent, we again miss the mark.”

— Richard J. Foster

79. “Willpower will never succeed in dealing with the deeply ingrained habits of sin. Emmet.”

— Richard J. Foster

80. “God’s ownership of everything also changes the kind of question we ask in giving. Rather than, “How much of my money should I give to God?” we learn to ask, “How much of God’s money should I keep for myself?” The difference between these two questions is of monumental proportions.”

— Richard J. Foster

81. “We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence; they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.”

— Richard J. Foster

82. “Countless people pray far more than they know. Often they have such a “stained-glass” image of prayer that they fail to recognize what they are experiencing as prayer and so condemn themselves for not praying.”

— Richard J. Foster

83. “In the same way that a small child cannot draw a bad picture so a child of God cannot offer a bad prayer.”

— Richard J. Foster

84. “Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit, simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justificat ion.”

— Richard J. Foster

85. “If we are to progress in the spiritual walk so that the Disciplines are a blessing and not a curse, we must come to the place in our lives where we can lay down the everlasting burden of always needing to manage others.”

— Richard J. Foster

86. “PRAYER IS THE serious business of the Church, the first and best business it renders for the world.”

— Richard J. Foster

87. “Make me a captive, Lord, And then I shall be free; Force me to render up my sword, And I shall conqueror be. I sink in life’s alarms When by myself I stand; Imprison me within Thine arms, And strong shall be my hand.2.”

— Richard J. Foster

88. “The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives – altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter.”

— Richard J. Foster

89. “The inner attitude of the heart is far more crucial than the mechanics for coming into the reality of the spiritual life.”

— Richard J. Foster

90. “Pride is one of the socially acceptable sins in some corners of the evangelical culture. Its just straight-out ego gratification – how important I am; whether my name gets on the building or on the TV program or in the magazine article.”

— Richard J. Foster

91. “In spiritual direction there is absolutely no domination or control.”

— Richard J. Foster

92. “When we despair of gaining inner transformation through human powers of will and determination, we are open to a wonderful new realization: inner righteousness is a gift from God to be graciously received. The needed change within us is God’s work, not ours. The demand is for an inside job, and only God can work from the inside. We cannot attain or earn this righteousness of the kingdom of God; it is a grace that is given.”

— Richard J. Foster

93. “We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air.”

— Richard J. Foster

94. “We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. ‘We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.’... It is time to awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.”

— Richard J. Foster

95. “Remember that the key to the Discipline of study is not reading many books, but experiencing what we do read.”

— Richard J. Foster

96. “Try to live one entire day in utter thanksgiving. Balance every complaint with ten gratitudes, every criticism with ten compliments.”

— Richard J. Foster

97. “It is in the everyday and the commonplace that we learn patience, acceptance, and contentment.”

— Richard J. Foster

98. “The lust for affluence in contemporary society has become psychotic; it has completely lost touch with reality.”

— Richard J. Foster

99. “To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn’t already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.” – Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words.”

— Richard J. Foster

100. “The primary purpose of prayer is to bring us into such a life of communion with the Father that, by the power of the Spirit, we are increasingly conformed to the image of the Son.”

— Richard J. Foster