E. Stanley Jones Quotes - Page 3

I have only to be true to the highest I know - success or failure is in the hand of God.

When we can sing in the face of death, we can sing in the face of anything.

Recognize negativism and inferiority attitudes as enemies - do not try to dress them as your friends. you will be tempted to look upon negativism as prudence and inferiorities as humility. Strip off those false cloaks and see these attitudes in their nakedness - as enemies of you and of your possibilities.

Our intentions may be very good, but, because the intelligence is limited, the action may turn out to be a mistake - a mistake, but not necessarily a sin, for sin comes out of a wrong intention.

To live by worry is to live against reality

Suppose you should fail. Is that so terrible? Not to have tried is a worse failure.

The moral laws of the Universe are deeply embedded in the constitution of things. We do not break them - we break ourselves upon them.

Being born in a Christian home does not make you a Christian.

In conversion you are not attached primarily to an order, nor to an institution, nor a movement, nor a set of beliefs, nor a code of action - you are attached primarily to a Person, and secondarily to these other things.

If we know how to pray, we know how to live.

When I met Christ, I felt that I had swallowed sunshine.

Many live in dread of what is coming. Why should we? The unknown puts adventure into life. ... The unexpected around the corner gives a sense of anticipation and surprise. Thank God for the unknown future.

Everything that happens to me can help me along in my Christian life.

God doesn't have any grandchildren.

Earth's blackest day and earth's brightest day are only three days apart.

In our Ashrams of East and West, places of spiritual retreat, we begin with what we call "The Morning of the Open Heart," in which we tell our needs. . . . We give four or five hours to this catharsis. The reaction of one member, who listened to it for the first time, was: "Good gracious, have we all the disrupted people in the country here?" My reply was: "No, you have a cross section of the church life honestly revealed." In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to a appear better than we really are.

The universe does not make sense without God.

At the cross God wrapped his heart in flesh and blood and let it be nailed to the cross for our redemption.

You cease to move into yourself, away from others. You give up your antagonism. You begin to move toward others in love. God moved toward you in gracious, outgoing love, and you move toward others in that same outgoing love.

We must continue to pursue the thought that we do not merely belong to the Kingdom - the Kingdom belongs to us.

Victorious living does not mean freedom from temptation, nor does it mean freedom from mistakes.

In the prayer time, the battle of the spiritual life is lost or won.

A Johns Hopkins doctor says that 'we do not know why it is that the worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact.' But I, who am simple of mind, think I know we are inwardly constructed, in nerve and tissue and brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. Therefore, the need of faith is not something imposed on us dogmatically, but it is written in us intrinsically. We cannot live without it. To live by worry is to live against Reality.

No person is free until he or she is free at the center. When we let go there, we are free indeed. When the self is renounced, then one stands utterly disillusioned, apart, asking for nothing. If anything comes to us, it is all sheer gain. Then life becomes one constant surprise.

If the Holy Spirit can take over the subconscious with our consent and cooperation, then we have almighty Power working at the basis of our lives, then we can do anything we ought to do, go anywhere we ought to go, and be anything we ought to be.