Philip Yancey Quotes

Complaining is the weapon of the weak.

I can't really change Nashville.

What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?

I think that fear comes about when there's things in the world that we want to change, things we're scared or angry about, and we can't change them, and so we become fearful; we develop anxiety.

When I get a fringe, it's because I'm bored or need a change; I always regret it!

I had many decades of me time and now I just don't have that anymore. There are days when I rail against it.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

Grumbling is the death of love.

My life is what it is, and I can't change it. I can change the future, but I can't do anything about the past.

After you get what you want you don't want it.

There's nothing like standing in a place and wanting nothing so much as to change but simply not being able to.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.

Powerlessness frustrates; absolute powerlessness frustrates absolutely. Absolute frustration is a dangerous emotion to run a world with.

I’m angry with what’s happening to our country and angry with myself that I can’t do more.

After being on the field for so long and feeling like you have some control over the outcome or what's happening out there, now I'm upstairs, and I have no control over anything. I'm working through that.

I think people like to have something to have a moan about.

It’s mentally exhausting, feeling bad about something you can do nothing about.

It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

I've never been a suicidal person. I've never been someone to want to see the world come to an end. But I would like to see something different than what I'm seeing. Because it is becoming a monotonous - as if you're watching re-runs of things you've already seen.

The most hateful grief of all human griefs is to have knowledge of a truth, but no power over the event.

And what had he wanted? He'd never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted yesterday to be different from today.

If there were nothing you'd still be complaining!