Philip Yancey Quotes

Things are always different from what they might be.

Life is not always what we think it is.

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

Even if you think the grass is greener on the other side, you’re going to have to mow that side too.

Our greatest illusion is disillusion. We imagine that we are disillusioned with life, when the truth is that we have not even begun to live.

I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, "Oh ...".

And when you start to think about death, you start to think about what's after it. And then you start hoping there is a God. For me, it's a frightening thought to go nowhere. I also can't believe that people like Stalin and Hitler are gonna go to the same place as Mother Teresa.

I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect.

Everything that happens is at least one dimension smaller than you've imagined it to be.

There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.

Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

Do not talk about the soul, heaven, or God. Talking about something that is not yet a reality for you amounts to falsehood.

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

I don;t think there's anything wrong with being a dreamer. There is not. But dreams have ways of turning into nightmares.

Life is not what you expected it to be.

Why are you messing with the fantasy? We know about the reality. Don't ruin the fantasy, OK?

We need to stop giving people excuses not to believe in God. You've probably heard the expression 'I believe in God, just not organized religion'. I don't think people would say that if the church truly lived like we are called to live.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

It can be consoling to think your children are in heaven. You have got to understand that that doesn't make it true. Many people cannot understand that distinction.

predilection, n. The preparatory stage of disillusion.