Francis Schaeffer Quotes

Those in the circle of Christ had no doubt of his love; those in our circles should have no doubt about ours.

If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin. If we are content to give them a cold impersonal 'charity' that is merely a matter of obligation, we will not trouble to understand them or to sympathize with them at all. And in that case we will not really love them, because love implies an efficacious will not only to do good to others exteriorly but also to find some good in them to which we can respond."

More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world.

When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end.

Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

Love to be real, it must cost—it must hurt—it must empty us of self.

I love all religions. ... If people become better Hindus, better Muslims, better Buddhists by our acts of love, then there is something else growing there." She upheld that there are many ways to God': "All is God - Buddists, Hindus, Christians, etc., all have access to the same God."

Let us not tire of preaching love; it is the force that will overcome the world. Let us not tire of preaching love. Though we see that waves of violence succeed in drowning the fire of Christian love, love must win out; it is the only thing that can.

If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.

Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked. It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and healthy heart.

Principles are what people have instead of God. To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbour's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child. Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them. 'Principle' is an even duller word than 'Religion'.

One of the best ways to walk in love is to be a blessing to other people or simply to help them.

A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated of illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not.

Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God.

Love is a bodily shape; and Christian works are no more than animate faith and love, as flowers are the animate springtide.

Love is basic for the very survival of mankind. I'm convinced that love is the only absolute ultimately; love is the highest good. He who loves has somehow discovered the meaning of ultimate reality. He who hates does not know God; he who hates has no knowledge of God. Love is the supreme unifying principle of life.

As Christians, we have an additional reason to love and serve the poor; for in them we see the face and the flesh of Christ, who made himself poor so to enrich us with his poverty.

If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love.

Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me - God of love only knows where.

So you walk up to this man sinner and you say, "God loves you and He has a wonderful plan for your life!" and he goes, "What? God loves me? That's fantastic. I LOVE ME, TOO! And He loves me more than I love me? Well, that's hard to imagine. I'll take a God like that. You got two of them?"

Love cannot exists as a duty; to tell a child that it ought to love its parents and its brother and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse.

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

Love is a human experience, not a political statement.

Christianity is not a legal relationship; it is a love relationship.