Rachel > Rachel's Quotes

“He was pierced and scourged and mocked. He was cursed and raised up on a tree, but He was in that ancient pose of victory.
An old man on a hill, a blind man between two pillars, the God Man on a cross.
Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.
Almost.
It is death by living.
The earth shook. The roof came down. The world changed. The armies fled.
That Moses kept his hands up.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Truth: We are the present. We are now. We are the razor's edge of history. The future flies at us and from that dark blur we shape the past. And the past is forever.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Rule 1 for Mortals: Love the Lord your God (with every bit of you).
Rule 2 for Mortals: Love your neighbor as yourself.
Tip 1 for Mortals: Ask God to call your bluffs.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“I listened to you tell me, tell everyone, and all the world, “Praise the Lord.” You were broken, but not by bullets and bombs. You were broken by grace.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Living is the same thing as dying. Living well is the same thing as dying for others.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Life is a story. Why do we die? Because we live. Why do we live? Because our Maker opened His mouth and began to tell a story.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Your life will contribute to a grand and wonderful story no matter what you do. You have been spoken. You are here, existing, choosing, living, shaping the future and carving the past. Your physical matter and your soul exist, not out of necessity, not voluntarily, and not under their own strength. There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist. You aren't doing anything that makes you be. We aren't the Author. You and I are spoken. We have been called into this art as characters, born into this thread of occurrence tumbling downstream in the long Niagara of loss set in motion by the trouble that faced our first father and first mother. We will contribute to this narrative. But how?”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain-they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter. With an average life expectancy of 78.2 years in the US (subtracting eight hours a day for sleep), I have around 250,00 conscious hours remaining to me in which I could be smiling or scowling, rejoicing in my life, in this race, in this story, or moaning and complaining about my troubles. I can be giving my fingers, my back, my mind, my words, my breaths, to my wife and my children and my neighbors, or I can grasp after the vapor and the vanity for myself, dragging my feet, afraid to die and therefore afraid to live. And, like Adam, I will still die in the end.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.”
― N.D. Wilson, Dandelion Fire

“The world takes us to a silver screen on which flickering images of passion and romance play, and as we watch, the world says, “This is love.” God takes us to the foot of a tree on which a naked and bloodied man hangs and says, “This is love.”
― Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye

“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“Let your cares drive you to God. I shall not mind if you have many of them if each one leads you to prayer. If every fret makes you lean more on the Beloved, it will be a benefit.”
― Charles H. Spurgeon

“If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“We remember, also, how that it is becoming increasingly difficult in these strenuous days for those who are desirous of studying the deeper things of God to find the time which such study requires.”
― Arthur W. Pink

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
― Martin Luther

“It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

“The fall of man did not introduce evil; it placed us on the wrong side of it, under its rule, needing rescue.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television. Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them into the home. We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Some Christians need encouragement to think before they act. Others need encouragement to act after they think.”
― Kevin DeYoung, Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will

“I need not torment myself with the fear that my faith may fail; as grace led me to faith in the first place, so grace will keep me believing to the end. Faith, both in its origin and continuance, is a gift of grace (Phil 1:29).”
― J.I. Packer, Knowing God