Sometimes a single quote will hit home harder than any sermon or editorial, and often times, it will be remembered throughout one’s life. Since it is recorded that the apostle Paul quoted two Greek pagan poets in the New Testament, (Epimenides in the first half of Acts 17:28 and Titus 1:12 with Aratus in the second half of Acts 17:28), we feel at liberty to quote believers and unbelievers alike if it is profitable for instruction and helps keep things in perspective. We have inserted the quotes below not as an endorsement of the author or a specific ideology, philosophy or theology (in fact, with some we are diametrically opposed), but as an acknowledgment of its instructional value. We are simply trying to convey the truth and what we can glean from it.
“Integrity is measured by the distance between your lips and your life.”
– Mark Sanborn
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“In the case of dissension, never dare to judge till you’ve heard the other side.”
– Euripides
“There’s a difference between changing your opinion and changing your lifestyle.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose.”
– Jim Elliot
“Every man is a missionary, now and forever, for good or for evil, whether he intends or designs it or not. He may be a blot radiating his dark influence outward to the very circumference of society, or he may be a blessing spreading benediction over the length and breadth of the world. But a blank he cannot be; there are no moral blanks; there are no neutral characters.”
– Thomas Chalmers
“Sympathy is no substitute for action.”
– David Livingstone
“It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.”
– George Whitfield
“Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the non-existent.”
– A.W. Tozer
“When I was young, I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before. At present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me.”
– John Wesley
“If your gospel isn’t touching others, it hasn’t touched you!”
– Curry R. Blake
“Use your ministry to build people, not people to build your ministry.”
– Jacquelyn K. Heasley
“I don’t know how your theology works, but if Jesus had a choice between stained glass windows and feeding starving kids in Haiti, I have a feeling he’d choose the starving kids in Haiti.”
– Tony Campolo
“One of these days, some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Some wish to live within the sound of a chapel bell; I wish to run a rescue mission within a yard of hell.”
– C.T. Studd
“Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us daily.”
– Sally Koch
“The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.”
– Confucius
“If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, while there remains someone who has not heard it once.”
– Oswald J. Smith
“How you believe God perceives people will determine how you respond to them.”
– Jacquelyn K. Heasley
“The man who has been taught by the Holy Spirit will be a seer rather than a scholar. The difference is that the scholar sees and the seer sees through; and that is a mighty difference indeed.”
– A.W. Tozer
“We must be global Christians with a global vision, because our God is a global God.”
– John Stott
“While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now, I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight, I’ll fight to the very end!”
– William Booth
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell
“The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.”
– Charles Spurgeon
“Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
– G.M. Trevelyan
“No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. The pulpit can be a shop window to display one’s talents; the prayer closet allows no showing off.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“It ill becomes the servant to seek to be rich, and great, and honored in that world where his Lord was poor, and mean, and despised.”
– George Muller
“The Great Commission is not an option to be considered; it is a command to be obeyed.”
– Hudson Taylor
“Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines with even more brilliancy than justice.”
– Miguel De Cervantes
“What comes to mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
– A.W. Tozer
“Simple assent to the gospel, divorced from a transforming commitment to the living Christ, is by Biblical standards less than faith, and less than saving, and to elicit only assent of this kind would secure only false conversions.”
– J.I. Packer
“We talk of the Second Coming; half the world has never heard of the first.”
– Oswald J. Smith
“Your doctrine can be as straight as a gun barrel and just as empty.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“Prayer is the highest intelligence, the profoundest wisdom, the most vital, the most joyous, the most efficacious, the most powerful of all vocations.”
– Edward M. Bounds
“Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love.”
– Roland Allen
“It is the duty of every Christian to be Christ to his neighbor.”
– Martin Luther
“The popular notion that the first obligation of the church is to spread the gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth is false. Her first obligation is to be spiritually worthy of it.”
– A.W. Tozer
“He who refrains from action when it is the time to act, he who in his youth and strength, gives himself over to idleness, he whose will and whose spirit are feeble, this slothful man shall never find the way that leads to wisdom.”
– Gautama Buddha
“He was, and is yet, most likely, the wearisomest, self righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbors.”
– Emily Bronte
“People are so prone to lean upon gifted men. And if they cannot have such, they get discouraged and scattered, instead of getting lovingly together and helping one another by their mutual faith.”
– C.H. Mackintosh
“There are only two kinds of persons: those dead in sin and those dead to sin.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“Education: That which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.”
– Mark Twain
“A test of a Christian’s character is what he does after he comes to the blockade in the road and what his attitude is after everything has left him except Jesus. You will never know down here that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have left. You will never be able to tell the world for sure that He will do in a crisis unless you learn how to live in a crisis.”
– Lester Roloff
“Keep your feet on the ground, but let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average or to surrender to the chill of your spiritual environment.”
– A.W. Tozer
“I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light.”
– John Keith Falconer
“Why do we expect to be better treated in this world than Jesus was.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Out of one hundred men, one will read the Bible, the other ninety-nine will read the Christian.”
– D.L. Moody
“Historians will conclude that we of the 20th century had the genius to create a great civilization, but we lacked the moral wisdom to preserve it.”
– A.W.Tozer
“Care more for a grain of faith than a ton of excitement.”
– Charles H. Spurgeon
“Christ is either Lord of all, or He is not Lord at all.”
– Hudson Taylor
“He does not believe, that does not live according to his belief.”
– Thomas Fuller
“Today’s church wants to be raptured from responsibility.”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“We must all have the spirit of martyrdom, though we may not all die martyrs.”
– George Whitefield
“Apart from God, nothing matters. We think that health matters, that freedom matters, or knowledge or art or civilization. And but for one insistent word, they would matter indeed. That word is eternity.”
– A.W. Tozer
“The only reason some of us are not exiled or thrown into prison is simply because we do not preach as fervently and as sternly as did Paul, John, Peter and others. This modern “santa claus” religion that is sweeping our country today is not the religion Jesus taught and John practiced.”
– Oliver B. Greene
“Let’s quit fiddling with religion and do something to bring the world to Christ.”
– Billy Sunday
“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?”
– Leonard Ravenhill
“The Adversary is raking in the prisoners and Gehenna isn’t for the weekend.”
– T.E.A.R.S.C.R.Y.
“Someone asked, ‘Will the heathen who has never heard the Gospel be saved?’ It is more a question with me whether we– who have the gospel and fail to give it to those who have not– can be saved.”
– Charles Spurgeon
“We desperately need seers who can see through the mist…Christian leaders with prophetic vision. Unless they come, it will be too late for this generation. And if they do come, we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy.”
– A.W. Tozer
“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 1 John 4:1 NKJV”
– The Apostle John