Vance Havner Quotes

The best sermon is preached by the minister who has a sermon to preach and not by the man who has to preach a sermon.

I'd make a bad preacher.

My father was a no-nonsense, dedicated, and focused minister, and there was usually a sermon he needed to prepare for or a Scripture he needed to study, and that always came first.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

I want to preach till the last breath in my lungs runs out.

A man must be himself convinced if he is to convince others. The prophet must be his own disciple, or he will make none. Enthusiasm is contagious: belief creates belief.

If your heart's not into what you're selling, you're not going to make it.

I do everything from my heart.

If I'm on stage and ministering my heart and pointing people to Christ, then that's all I can do.

Let us pray for all good and faithful priests who dedicate themselves to their people with generosity and unknown sacrifices.

The great reason why we have so little good preaching is that we have so little piety. To be eloquent one must be in earnest; he must not only act as if he were in earnest, or try to be in earnest, but be in earnest.

Any preacher who preaches beyond that which he has experienced is incapable of preaching with conviction.

Tupac was just so passionate about what he believes in and not afraid to say anything.

I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach.

You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.

And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.

A sermon is no sermon in which I cannot hear the heartbeat.

You have to really care about what you say. And if you don't, it will never come out quite right, unless you go into acting, in which case you have to act fast before you realize it is something which you do not believe in.

It is a fine thing to see people in hot earnest about anything.

I love to see when people are real passionate about what they feel and what they say.

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.

We are sometimes stirred by emotion and take it for zeal.

I just sing the song and I sing it with conviction, meaning and I get into the mood of every song I do no matter how much time I have in between.

Anything that I've put my name to and my face to and put my time into, is something that I'm clearly passionate about, or I wouldn't be there.

[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I had to pick songs that I felt the same about.