Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.

My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do: and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him.

It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people.

Generally speaking, it has been my ambition to write as a good old nurse will speak when she tells fairy tales.

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

Most of our history has been recorded orally. Among us Cherokee people we used to have people who were trained to listen at all meetings and then pass it on.

If you want to get serious about Africa becoming a knowledge continent, this is something that we need to address very seriously, we need to start documenting, we need to start codifying this knowledge, and unfortunately, we are racing against time because tradition in Africa is that the transmission has always been oral. So we need to get our act together and make it happen.

I can understand how evolution says, "don't believe in God", but I've never had this problem. I've always loved His creation. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean any_thing to some people, and I just don't get that! After all, if you just read the Bible plainly, it tells you everything. From Creation, to the Flood, to Jesus. I can't see how you can come to the conclusion, there is no God.

John Bunyan, while he had a surpassing genius, would not condescend to cull his language from the garden of flowers; but he went into the hayfield and the meadow, and plucked up his language by the roots, and spoke out in the words that the people used in their cottages.

Uncommon things must be said in common words.

We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard.

The teaching which is written on paper is not the true teaching. Written teaching is a kind of food for your brain. Of course it is necessary to take some food for your brain, but it is more important to be yourself by practicing the right way of life.

Uncommon things must be said in common words, if you would have them to be received in less than a century.

I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing.

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

God's ways are more than Man's arithmetic.

Independently of the curious circumstance that such tales should be found existing in very different countries and languages, which augurs a greater poverty of human invention than we would have expected, there is also a sort of wild fairy interest in them, which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them.

The attributes of God, though intelligible to us on their surface yet, for the very reason that they are infinite, transcend our comprehension, when they are dwelt upon, when they are followed out, and can only be received by faith.