Quote

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.

Eugene H. Peterson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eugene H. Peterson
Age: 85 †
Born: 1932
Born: November 6
Died: 2018
Died: October 22
Author
Bible Translator
Theologian
Translator
University Teacher
Stanwood
Washington
Making
True
Lace
Make
Speech
Becomes
Religious
Sound
Less
Words

More quotes by Eugene H. Peterson

Image
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God it whets our appetite.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
Spirituality is no different from what weve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. Its just ordinary stuff.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
Exile (being where we don't want to be with people we don't want to be with) forces a decision: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself?...'I will do my best with what is here.'
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
When you are part of a megachurch you have no responsibility to anybody else.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has a time of harvest. All suffering, pain, emptiness, disappointment is seed: sow it in God and He will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
One of the reasons that Christians read Scripture repeatedly and carefully is to find out just how God works in Jesus Christ so that we can work in the name of Jesus Christ.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We're called to have people follow Jesus. We're called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality . . . a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
If you don't take a Sabbath, something is wrong. You're doing too much, you're being too much in charge. You've got to quit, one day a week, and just watch what God is doing when you're not doing anything.
Eugene H. Peterson
Image
The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account.
Eugene H. Peterson