Top 130 Quotes & Sayings by Eric Metaxas - Page 2

Being an American is something we need to learn and understand.

I thought a book on miracles might be a great idea, but just because it's a great idea doesn't mean I'm supposed to do it. But my editor persisted, and eventually I thought, 'He's right. I should write this book.'

As Christians, we sin with anger because we lack faith in God's ability to provide for or protect us.

As an undergrad, I was the editor of the Yale humor magazine, and since then, I've published humor in the 'New York Times' and 'Atlantic,' among other places.

I think that there are deceptive forces out there that will try to lead us away from God, and we really do need to be careful.

America is the only nation in the world based on an idea - freedom and self-government - so if we don't understand that idea and what sacrifices were made to win that freedom and keep it for over two centuries, how can we possibly continue to keep it?

We may have city lights and the glow of touch screens to obscure our view, but God's world is still near at hand, even right here in New York City where I live.

America is fundamentally exceptional. No one in the history of the world had ever done anything to compare with what the Founders did, creating a fragile mechanism by which men and women could actually govern themselves.

The truth is many singles deeply desire and pray for marriage.

People everywhere see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good and long to know their source. And, thank God, He has revealed Himself!

I guess I'm concerned that vulgarity has now officially entered the mainstream of our culture, and I think people have to respectfully stand up and say, 'No thanks.'

One of my favorite things about America is our breathtaking collection of national and state parks, many of which boast wonders the Psalmist would envy.

Most people really have no problem with the idea of a creator God. Their question is just what is this God like, how can I know about him, how can I know him.

When Trump says America first, it doesn't mean cheering for America only. It means if you want to care for your neighbors, you have to make sure that you are yourself, first, healthy.

Thinking about the sins of others give us a feeling of moral superiority. But thinking about our own sins is a humbling experience, which is generally much less fun.

I think the fact that I use salty words in my Bonhoeffer book would tip you off that I'm no prude, exactly.

Every single cell in each person's body tells us whether that person is a male or a female. There is no human being in history whose cells have some mixture of the two, nor anyone who has ever been able to change that cellular reality.

Donald Trump is not some great man of virtue, but this much I'll say for him: I think he loves America, and I don't think he wants to line his own pockets.

I came to the conclusion over time that Trump is not the person I feared he was in the beginning when I was against him.

We've always been the most generous nation in the world when it comes to caring for those outside of our borders.

Perhaps the best thing about biographies is that they enable us to slip the strictures of time and provide a bracing corrective to our tendency to see everything in the dark glass of our own era, with all its blind spots, motes, beams, and distortions.

Restricting the religious impulses of Americans is precisely like killing free enterprise with too many regulations.

Sometimes you have to hold your nose and vote for the person who is going to do the least damage or who is maybe going to pull you back from the brink.

I'm the author of several books, including children's books.

I'm willing to give Pat Robertson a pass when he says things he shouldn't. That's because for every wacky, regrettable thing he says, he does a hundred thousand non-wacky good things that you'll never hear about on television.

Trump errs on the side of bluster sometimes for effect, but I don't think that the people who voted for him, most of them, would ever be for not caring for immigrants or refugees. People in the church know it's our obligation.

Quite simply, our isolation from nature has become isolation from God's Word. Cocooned in our manmade world of climate-controlled homes, cars, subways, and high-rises, we're finding it easier to live as practical atheists.

Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.

Every country has things to be proud of and to celebrate.

Often, we have only focused on what we've done wrong as a nation. Of course we should face our sins and our mistakes. But if we get stuck there and don't focus on where we've come from and how we've overcome those sins and mistakes, we are truly to be pitied.

Work allows us to take care of God's creation and bring glory to Him as His stewards.

God gave men and women work to do in the Garden before the Fall.

We all can do our part to address America's anger mismanagement crisis. And for us Christians, it starts with a little more faith, hope, and love.

Work is not optional for those able to do work, and that's most of us. There are to be no shirkers in the Lord's kingdom.

Doesn't assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

Here's one thing the media and all of us should learn: Trump is not wrong nearly as much as everybody says he's wrong.

For proof that our culture has gone to the dogs, look no further than the bizarrely parental ways many Americans talk about our furry friends.

David Frum, every now and again, comes up with something pretty darn brilliant.

Men and women are complements to each other, physically and otherwise.

Ever heard of anyone executed for distributing copies of Grimm's fairy tales? Imagine people trying to smuggle copies of Hans Christian Andersen's works into China? The Bible, which has been called a mere collection of myths has suffered all of these fates: even today, copies of the Bible are banned and burned. There's something about this ancient book that threatens and frightens those in power.

The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.

Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

The more science learns, the clearer it is that although we are here, we shouldn't be. Once we begin considering the details of it all, the towering odds against our existence begin to become a bit unsettling. When we come to see the superlatively extreme precariousness of our existence, and begin to understand how by any accounting, we ought not to exist, what are we to think or feel? Our existence seems to be not merely a virtually impossible miracle but the most outrageous miracle conceivable, one that makes previously amazing miracles seem like almost nothing.

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God's word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer knew that twisting the Truth to sell it more effectively was inexcusable. For Bonhoeffer the challenge was to present the Truth as purely as possible without attempting to help it along or dress it up.

True faith is not a leap into the dark; it's a leap into the light

...when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.

When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They’ve substituted a toothless ‘freedom of worship’ for ‘freedom of religion’.

Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.

Religion is the most fragile of all freedoms. And that's because it is the most threatening to those in power.

Belief in God is an act of faith. But so is believing our existence is simply the result of chance.

He did not hope that God heard his prayers; he knew it.

If God is God, he is the God of reality and facts and science and history.

He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.

Ideas have far-reaching consequences, and one must be ever so careful about what one allows to lodge in one's brain.

We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.

Jesus was and is the enemy of dead religion.

Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionist, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.