Francis Schaeffer Quotes

What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.

One has followed the other in an endless circle, for it is certain that as man's insight increases so he finds both wretchedness and greatness within himself. In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.

To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.

It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.

God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch.

I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world.

We are not just flesh and blood. And our hungers are not going to be set aside as just flesh and blood.

Not knowing life, how can we know death? Why talk of spirits when you do not understand men?

A short life is better for mankind, for a long life would deprive man of his optimism.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

The world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

I always thought that as long as man is mortal, he will never be relaxed.

But whate'er I am, nor I nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased 'til he be eased With being nothing.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.

Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.

Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?

The only sin is the sin of being born.