Clay Collins > Clay's Quotes

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
― Frederick Buechner

“The love for equals is a human thing--of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing--the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing--to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints. And then there is the love for the enemy--love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

“All truth is given by revelation, either general or special, and it must be received by reason. Reason is the God-given means for discovering the truth that God discloses, whether in his world or his Word. While God wants to reach the heart with truth, he does not bypass the mind.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“Lord, stamp eternity on my eyeballs.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“A truly humble man is sensible of his natural distance from God; of his dependence on Him; of the insufficiency of his own power and wisdom; and that it is by God's power that he is upheld and provided for, and that he needs God's wisdom to lead and guide him, and His might to enable him to do what he ought to do for Him.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“Resolution One: I will live for God. Resolution Two: If no one else does, I still will.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“Holiness appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader

“One of these grand defects, as I humbly conceive, is this, that children are habituated to learning without understanding.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16: Letters and Personal Writings

“Grace is the seed of glory, the dawning of glory in the heart, and therefore grace is the earnest of the future inheritance.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections

“The spirit of bondage works by fear for the slave fears the rod: but love cries, Abba, Father; it disposes us to go to God, and behave ourselves towards God as children; and it gives us clear evidence of our union to God as His children, and so casts out fear. So that it appears that the witness of the Spirit the apostle speaks of, is far from being any whisper, or immediate suggestion or revelation; but that gracious holy effect of the Spirit of God in the hearts of the saints, the disposition and temper of children, appearing in sweet childlike love to God, which casts out fear or a spirit of a slave.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections

“I claim no right to myself, no right to this understanding, this will, these affections that are in me. Neither do I have any right to this body or its members, no right to this tongue, to these hands, feet, ears or eyes. I have given myself clear away and not retained anything of my own.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“How can you expect to dwell with God forever, if you so neglect and forsake him here?”
― Jonathan Edwards, Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards

“Men will trust in God no further than they know Him; and they cannot be in the exercise of faith in Him one ace further than they have a sight of His fulness and faithfulness in exercise.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections

“You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“By the grace of God we will never pluck unripe fruit. We will never press people to decision, because we'll lead them to damnation and not salvation.”
― Jonathan Edwards