Quotes from Philip Yancey

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.

I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win; God may indeed keep track of how well we love.

Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.

God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.

Christian faith is... basically about love and being loved and reconciliation. These things are so important, they're foundational and they can transform individuals, families.

... the core problem with Christians communicating faith: we do not always do so in love. That is an indispensable point to presenting faith in a grace-full way.

We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

Love deems this world worth rescuing.

The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church or wounded by the church or wary of the church for whatever reason.

...to see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes.

Grace is heartfelt, tinged with love, a spillover gift of the God who extended undeserved favor toward us.

We deserve punishment and get forgiveness; we deserve God's wrath and get God's love.

Prayer enters the pool of God's love and widens outward.

Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness - and certainly not love.

For me, prayer is not so much me setting out a shopping list of requests for God to consider as it is a way of 'keeping company with God.'

Most of the great books on prayer are written by 'experts' - monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I've read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.

I think guilt is directional. You should get rid of it, but the way to get rid of it is not to get rid of the guilt feelings. It is to get rid of the wrong that you did that caused the guilt feelings.

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less

People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.

[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.

God does not accept me conditionally, on the basis of my performance, but bestows his love and forgiveness freely, despite my innumerable failures.

I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.

Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.