Elisabeth Elliot

“The woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling which bears her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.”

“Christ is sufficient. We do not need "support groups" for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.”

“Is it more important to understand than to obey? Is it more important to me to know than to believe?”

“The failure to cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single cause of mental breakdown," the great physician William Osler told the students of Yale . . .”

“You can never lose what you have offered to Christ.”

“Money holds terrible power when it is loved”

“If she had been born a hundred years later, she would very likely have been encouraged to be angry, told she had a right to express her anger and her sorrow and her bewilderment and her rage, and generally to disintegrate. These were not the expectations of her friends and family. Nothing could have been further from her expectations of herself. Instead, she threw herself into serving others.”

“...Ponnammal set the example for the others by quietly doing what they did not care to do. Her spirit created a new climate in the place, and the time came when there was not one nurse who would refuse to do whatever needed to be done.”

“She is free not by disobeying the rules but by obeying them.”

“The way you keep your house, the way you organize your time, the care you take in your personal appearance, the things you spend your money on, all speak loudly about what you believe. The beauty of thy peace shines forth in an ordered life. A disordered life speaks loudly of disorder in the soul.”

“The way we live ought to manifest the truth of what we believe. A messy life speaks of a messy and incoherent faith.”

“Freedom begins way back. It begins not with doing what you want but with doing what you ought - that is, with discipline.”

“Whoever is ashamed of marriage is also ashamed of being thought a man, or else he thinks that he can make himself better than God made him.”

“Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.”

“We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I'm sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction.”

“Failure means nothing now, only that it taught me life.”

“Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?”

“God withholds blessing only in wisdom, never in spite or aloofness.”

“Needs multiply as they are met. Woe to the man who would live a disentangled life. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth!”

“A little leavening of dissatisfied temper will spread through a group and change outlooks.”

“The devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, crowds. He will not allow quietness.”

“Let not him who accepts light in an instant despise him who gropes months in shadows.”

“Are we so childish (I do not say childlike) as to think that a God who could scheme a Jesus-plan would lead poor pilgrims into situations they could not bear?”

“Eve's daughters are as flowers and none can ever say they are through unfolding. And what man can predict the consummate end of such a life when its ultimate center is Sharon's Rose?”

“The spirit is liquid and easily flows and surges, sinking and boiling with the currents of circumstances. Bringing every thought into the obedience of Christ is no easy-chair job.”

“He makes His ministers a flame of fire. Am I ignitable? God deliver me from the dread asbestos of ‘other things’.”

“A man's thoughts dye his soul, attributed to Marcus Aurelius”

“His enthusiasm and willingness to use what he learned made him get ahead in Spanish.”

“Cold prayers, like cold suitors, are seldom effective in their aims.”

“It takes a while for revelry to turn to reverence, and much repetition of truth to eventual turn young zeal into habitual channels for good.”

“Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first?”

“The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”

“The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can't really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.”

“Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone accept, His Lordship. The Cross, as it enters the love life, will reveal the heart’s truth.”

“Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.”

“Do you often feel like parched ground, unable to produce anything worthwhile? I do. When I am in need of refreshment, it isn't easy to think of the needs of others. But I have found that if, instead of praying for my own comfort and satisfaction, I ask the Lord to enable me to give to others, an amazing thing often happens - I find my own needs wonderfully met. Refreshment comes in ways I would never have thought of, both for others, and then, incidentally, for myself.”

“George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.”

“Either we are adrift in chaos or we are individuals, created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where we are. Can you believe that? Can you trust God for that?”

“When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable).”

“Think of the self that God has given as an acorn. It is a marvelous little thing, a perfect shape, perfectly designed for its purpose, perfectly functional. Think of the grand glory of an oak tree. God’s intention when He made the acorn was the oak tree. His intention for us is ‘… the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’ Many deaths must go into our reaching that measure, many letting-goes. When you look at the oak tree, you don’t feel that the loss’ of the acorn is a very great loss. The more you perceive God’s purpose in your life, the less terrible the losses seem.”

“I took it for granted that there must be a few men left in the world who had that kind of strength. I assumed that those men would also be looking for women with principle. I did not want to be among the marked-down goods on the bargain table, cheap because they’d been pawed over. Crowds collect there. It is only the few who will pay full price. "You get what you pay for.”

“The heart which has no agenda but God's is the heart at leisure from itself. Its emptiness is filled with the Love of God. Its solitude can be turned into prayer.”

“The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived - not always looked forward to as though the "real" living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.”

“Of all things difficult to rule, none were more so than my will and affections.”

“Women still dream and hope, pin their emotions on some man who doesn't reciprocate, and end up in confusion.”

“I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminatory "making out" and "sleeping around," we forfeit something we cannot well do without. There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer protected and prized.”

“By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.”

“Leave it all in the Hands that were wounded for you”

“Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.”

“We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom He has given the breath of life. We die in order to live.”