Inspirational Quotes by Philip Yancey
“I’m convinced that human beings instinctively seek two things. We long for meaning, a sense that our life somehow matters to the world around us. And we long for community, a sense of being loved.”
“Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job, the Lord of the universe has many things to manage, and in the midst of my self-pity I would do well to contemplate for a moment God’s own point of view.”
― Philip Yancey ,
from Prayer
“As Sicknesse is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deterss them who should assist from coming; even the Phisician dares scarse come... it is an Outlawry, and excommunication upon the patient....”
“No man is an island, no man stands alone . . . Each man's death diminishes me, because I am involved with mankind . . .”
“Don’t judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear his name.”
“The surface of my “slow art” is prismatic, so at first glance the malachite surface looks green. But if the eye is allowed to linger on the surface—it usually takes ten minutes for the eye to adjust—the observer can begin to see the rainbow created by layer upon layer of broken shards of minerals. Such a contemplative experience can be a deep sensory journey toward wisdom. Willingness to spend time truly seeing can change how we view the world, moving us away from our fast-food culture of superficially scanning what we see and becoming surfeited with images that do not delve below the surface.”
“They [Old Testament] taught me about Life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.”
― Philip Yancey ,
from The Bible Jesus Read
topics: life
“The brain’s total number of connections rivals the stars and galaxies of the universe.”
“Could it be that Christians, eager to point out how good we are, neglect the basic fact that the gospel sounds like good news only to bad people?”
“Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified. —Mahatma Gandhi”
“One man told me the most helpful person during his long illness was an office colleague who called every day, just to check. His visits, usually twice a week, never exceeded fifteen minutes, but the consistency of his calls and visits became a fixed point, something he could count on when everything else in his life seemed unstable.”
― Philip Yancey ,
“Man and woman, in a world without suffering, chose against God.”
― Philip Yancey ,
“A wise sufferer will look not inward, but outward. There is no more effective healer than a wounded healer, and in the process the wounded healer’s own scars may fade away.”
― Philip Yancey ,
“We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate choice of their own mothers.”
“It is dangerous and perhaps even unscriptural to torture ourselves by looking for his message in a specific throb of pain, a specific instance of suffering. The message may simply be that we live in a world with fixed laws, like everyone else. But from the larger view, from the view of all history, yes, God speaks to us through suffering—or perhaps in spite of suffering. The symphony he is composing includes minor chords, dissonance, and tiresome fugal passages. But those of us who follow his conducting through early movements will, with renewed strength, someday burst into song.”
― Philip Yancey ,
“Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.”
“But the Lord say he won’t put more on us than we can stand. If we can’t take it, he’ll be right there beside us giving stren’th we didn’t know we had.”
― Philip Yancey ,
“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... Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”
“The female runner still lags behind the male, and blame rests on the pelvis. The projections on the man’s pelvis allow for more powerful muscles, but a woman equipped with them could not bear a child. Similarly, a man’s hip sockets are closer together, nearer the center of gravity, which enables more efficient movement. If a woman’s were similarly designed, there would be no room for the baby’s head to extrude. So the odd pelvic bone represents a summation of many different requirements. When a woman wishes she could run faster or sway less or have a narrower base, let her know that the survival of the human race depends upon her being just the shape she is.”
“Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.”
Group of Brands
© 2026 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
Philip Yancey is an American Christian author. Fourteen million of his books have been sold worldwide, making him one of the best-selling evangelical Christian authors. Two of his books have won the ECPA's Christian Book of the Year Award: The Jesus I Never Knew in 1996, What's So Amazing About Grace in 1998. He is published by Zondervan Publishing.
Yancey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. When Yancey was one year old, his father, stricken with polio, died after his church elders suggested he go off life support in faith that God would heal him. This was one of the reasons he had lost his faith at one point of time. Yancey earned his MA with highest honors from the graduate school of Wheaton College. His two graduate degrees in Communications and English were earned from Wheaton College Graduate School and the University of Chicago.
Yancey moved to Chicago, Illinois, and in 1971 joined the staff of Campus Life magazine--a sister publication of Christianity Today directed towards high school and college students--where he served as editor for eight years. Yancey was for many years an editor for Christianity Today and wrote articles for Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Eternity, Moody Monthly, and National Wildlife, among others. He now lives in Colorado, working as a columnist and editor-at-large for Christianity Today. He is a member of the editorial board of Books and Culture, another magazine affiliated with Christianity Today, and travels around the world for speaking engagements.