Sermon quotes on words
W.H. Auden
I like hanging around words, listening to what they say.
Quoted in Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 80.
Augustine of Hippo
I am saddened that my tongue cannot live up to my heart.
John Bunyan
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
John Bunyan
The best prayers have often more groans than words.
Winston Churchill
By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.
Francis of Assisi
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
Timothy Keller
Have you heard God’s blessing in your inmost being? Are the words, ‘You are my beloved child, in whom I delight’ an endless source of joy and strength? Have you sensed, through the Holy Spirit, God speaking to you? That blessing- the blessing through the Spirit that is ours through Christ- is what Jacob received and it is the only remedy against idolatry.
Martin Luther
Sometimes the curses of the godless sound better than the hallelujahs of the pious.
Peter Marshall
Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.
Blaise Pascal
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
Eugene Peterson
Language is primarily a means of revelation, both for God and for us. Using words, God reveals himself to us. Using words, we reveal ourselves to God and to one another. By means of language, the entire cycle of speaking and listening, both God and his Word-created men and women are able to reveal vast interiors otherwise inaccessible to us.
Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in his Stories and Prayers
Eugene Peterson
It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.
Gary Smalley
Affirming words from moms and dads are like light switches. Speak a word of affirmation at the right moment in a child’s life and it’s like lighting up a whole roomful of possibilities.
Source Unknown
John Wayne
Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much
Elie Wiesel
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
G.K. Chesterton
The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea.
Orthodoxy, Image Publishing.
Glen Scrivener
The next time you say something deceitful, hurtful or proud, you cannot say “I don’t know what came over me.” Nothing came over you. Such sins come outof you. They come from a wellspring that is very dark, very deep and very old. You know it. We all feel it. Adam explains it
Long Story Short: The Bible in 12 Phrases, Christian Focus Publication.
Annie Dillard
I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Be sincere, Be brief, Be seated.
Bob Goff
None of us complete each other, but we can add a few words to the lives of the people around us to help them understand God’s bigger plan for all of us.
Taken from Maria Goff, Love Lives Here: Finding What You Need in a World Telling You What You Want. B&H Publishing Group.
Mark Twain
The difference between the right word and the almost right word, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Al Capone
You can get more done with a kind word and a gun, than with a gun alone.
Edward Goerge Bulwer-Lytton
Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.
Richelieu Act 2, Sc. 2, 1839.
Eugene Peterson
I found that keeping company with poets, men and women who care about words and are honest with them, who respect and honor their sheer overwhelming power, kept me alert—biblically alert, Jesus alert.
Gregory Spencer
As a language-user, I’m bound to all the audacious capacities and frustrating limits of words. We label, we name, we frame all of our experiences, past, present, and future. We give words to our inner and outer worlds. In doing so, we construct a kind of home we carry with us.
Reframing the Soul: How Words Transform Our Faith, Leafwood Publishers, 2018.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, who life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p.4.
Westley (Cary Ewes)
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The Princess Bride
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