Douglas Wilson > Quotes

“Become the kind of person the kind of person you would like to marry would like to marry.”
― Douglas Wilson

“Education is the process of selling someone on books. ”
― Douglas Wilson

“God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents...”
― Douglas Wilson

“Immodest and attractive is easy. Modest and repulsive is easy too. But modest and attractive is an art form.”
― Douglas Wilson, 5 Paths to the Love of Your Life: Defining Your Dating Style

“This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.”
― Douglas Wilson

“To reject Christ because the church has sin of this sort in it is like rejecting hospitals because they are full of sick people.”
― Douglas Wilson

“If boys don't learn, men won't know.”
― Douglas Wilson

“I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.”
― Douglas Wilson

“Remember that Jesus has a body in this world. You are His hands and feet. But remember also that His hands and feet were pierced.”
― Douglas Wilson

“If there are weeds in my garden, I have a problem. But it does not lead me to question the existence of lettuce.”
― Douglas Wilson

“God picks us up where we are, not where we should have been”
― Douglas Wilson, Reforming Marriage: Gospel Living for Couples

“Honor must start in the heart, but if it ends there, it isn’t honor. Honor must be expressed through words, symbols, actions, or gestures. Honor is among the most incarnational of the virtues. It must have feet and hands.”
― Douglas Wilson

“Be at peace with being lousy for a while. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. He was right. Only an insufferable egoist expects to be brilliant first time out.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“When the parent is qualified to discipline, he probably does not feel like it, and when he feels like it, he is probably not qualified.”
― Douglas Wilson, Standing on the Promises: A Handbook of Biblical Childrearing

“Pace yourself in your reading. A little bit every day really adds up. If you read during sporadic reading jags, the fits and starts will not get you anywhere close to the amount of reading you will need to do. It is far better to walk a mile a day than to run five miles every other month. Make time for reading, and make a daily habit of it, even if it is a relatively small daily habit.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don't own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?”
― Douglas Wilson

“A lot of aspiring writers quote the right people, but they do so like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. They quote Austen like Mary quoted her eighteenth-century bromides, and were Austen here to see them do it, she'd slap them right into her next book, and it wouldn't be pretty.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“Beware of anyone who claims to be neutral, for they always have an agenda.”
― Douglas Wilson, What I Learned in Narnia

“But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.”
― Douglas Wilson, Is Christianity Good for the World?

“Know something about the world, and by this I mean the world outside of books. This might require joining the Marines, or working on an oil rig or as a hash slinger at a truck stop in Kentucky. Know what it smells like out there. If everything you write smells like a library, then your prospective audience will be limited to those who like the smell of libraries.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“We are like fruitflies, measuring everything in terms of our own lifespan. But since our lifespans are so short, our perspective is entirely wrong.

God, who inhabits eternity, sees things differently. He knows that our lives are just a mist. We should trust Him. It was not that long ago that Jesus came and it will not be that long before He returns.”
― Douglas Wilson

“I believe firmly in plodding. Productivity is more a matter of diligent, long-distance hiking than it is one-hundred-yard dashing. Doing a little bit now is far better than hoping to do a lot on the morrow. So redeem the fifteen minute spaces. Chip away at it.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“For the people of God, the Word of God leaves pleasant bruises.”
― Douglas Wilson, Exhortations : A Call to Maturity in Worship

“Wealth is a gift from God, and pride is bequeathed to us from the devil.”
― Douglas Wilson

“Your writing advances a particular view of the world. Pretending that it does't just confuses everybody, starting with you.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“I don’t feel safe around anything when Jesus is not the Lord of it. Calvinism without Jesus is deadly; it’s fatalism, it’s simply Islam. We need Jesus. When the precious doctrines [of Calvinism] are used to perpetuate gloom, severity, introspection, accusations, morbidity, slander, gnat-stringing, and more, the soul is not safe.”
― Douglas Wilson

“The fact that you can't remember things doesn't mean that you haven't been shaped by them.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“I have often told people that they need to evaluate their lives by the video, and not by the snapshot. That is, they should not just look at one moment in time, but rather consider trajectories, tendencies, and narrative arc as well.”
― Douglas Wilson

“The independence of art from worldview and worldview concerns is a myth. Every work of art is produced within a framework of worldview assumptions.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“The TSA must think we're mushrooms. You know, the way they are trying to keep us in the dark, and the way they keep feeding us a fertilizing agent that comes from the south end of a north-bound cow.”
― Douglas Wilson