Philip Yancey Quotes

How well I walk my talk, and not talk my talk, determines the quality of my engagement, of all my experience with what is quite personally my God. I'm my greatest teacher, and within me, I have the power to push myself deeper and higher.

I hope to God that the inner strength that will vindicate my deeds will in good time spring forth from my own people. I have done as I had to on the prompting of my inner voice.

When we listen to the Inner Voice, our outer life becomes full of peace.

I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.

Somewhere in there, among the worries, questions, advice and advertising jingles, lives your intuition, your true 'inner voice.' You can hear it to the extent that you give it your attention.

Let no man give advice to others that he has not first given himself.

The things we pray for, good Lord, give us grace to labor for.

Only disciplined people become free, but their discipline is not obedience to others: their discipline is obedience to their own inner voice. And they are ready to risk anything for it.

Lean on thyself until thy strength is tried; Then ask God's help; it will not be denied. Use thine own sight to see the way to go; When darkness falls ask God the path to show. Think for thyself and reason out thy plan; God has His work and thou hast thine. Exert thy will and use for self-control; God gave thee jurisdiction of thy soul. All thine immortal powers bring into play; Think, act, strive, reason, and look up and pray.

...the more strictly and faithfully every man and woman lives up to the guidance and teaching of this Inward Anointing - and never turns aside to the right hand or left for the precepts and traditions of men - the more instruction and help they afford one another.

For me the Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or the still small Voice mean one and the same thing.

Never will I pray for the material things of the world. I am not calling to a servant to bring me food. I am not ordering an innkeeper to provide me with room. Never will I seek delivery of gold, love, good health, petty victories, fame, success, or happiness. Only for guidance will I pray, that I may be shown the way to acquire these things, and my prayer will always be answered.

If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God. But if I were in a state of sin, do you think the Voice would come to me? I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.

The satyagrahi general has to obey his inner voice, for over and above the situation outside he examines himself constantly and listens to the dictates of the inner self.

Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not "follow the footsteps of his most holy life" by the exercise of a trained religious imagination, but by treading the firm, rough earth, up hill and down dale.

If you follow the voice inside you, it does give you guidance.

Conscience, that vicegerent of God in the human heart, whose "still small voice" the loudest revelry cannot drown.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

Obey the voice within - it commands us to give of ourselves and help others. As long as we have the capacity to give, we are alive

Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges unto yourselves. Take yourself no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone besides yourselves. And those, Ananda, who either now or after I am dead, Shall be a lamp unto themselves, Shall betake themselves as no external refuge, But holding fast to the truth as their lamp, Holding fast to the truth as their refuge, Shall not look for refuge to anyone else besides themselves, It is they who shall reach to the very topmost height; But they must be anxious to learn.

Much of her life had been lived like a balancing act on a spearpoint fence, and on a particularly difficult night when she was twelve, she had decided that instinct was, in fact, the quiet voice of God. Prayers did receive replies, but you had to listen closely and believe in the answer. At twelve, she wrote in her diary: "God doesn't shout; He whispers, and in the whisper is the way.

Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.

Prayer is often an argument of laziness: "Lord, my temper gives me a vast deal of inconvenience, and it would be a great task for me to correct it; and wilt thou be pleased to correct it for me, that I may get along easier?" If prayer was answered under such circumstances, independent of action of natural laws, it would be paying a premium on indolence.

The life of the consciousness is boundless. It interpenetrates the world and is woven in all its imagery. Therefore, we must listen closely to our inner voice.

I am convinced that there is no simple formula or technique that I could give you or that you could give your students that would immediately facilitate mastering the ability to be guided by the Holy Spirit. Nor do I believe that the Lord will ever allow someone to conceive a pattern that would invariably and immediately open the channels of spiritual communication. We grow when we labor to recognize the guidance of the Holy Ghost as we struggle to communicate our needs to our Father in Heaven in moments of dire need or overflowing gratitude.