quotes by A.W. Tozer

"one hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organization do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team."
— A.W. Tozer

"Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will."
— A.W. Tozer

""I want the presence of God Himself, or I don't want anything at all to do with religion...I want all that God has or I don't want any."


"
— A.W. Tozer

"It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply."
— A.W. Tozer

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."
— A.W. Tozer

"The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest."
— A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)

"We can afford to follow Him to failure. Faith dares to fail. The resurrection and the judgment will demonstrate before all worlds who won and who lost. We can wait."
— A.W. Tozer (Born After Midnight)

"The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly
has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.
"
— A.W. Tozer

"The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions."
— A.W. Tozer

"It is doubtful that God can use a man greatly until He hurts him deeply."
— A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)

"I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven."
— A.W. Tozer

"The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has not done deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic."
— A.W. Tozer (Tozer on the Almighty God: A 366-day Devotional)

"Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience."
— A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life)

"Nothing is complete in itself but requires something outside itself in order to exist."
— A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life)

"The problem of why God created the universe still troubles thinking men; but if we cannot know why, we can at least know that He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself, as a man might build a house to shelter him against the winter cold or plant a field of corn to provide him with necessary food. The word 'necessary' is wholly foreign to God."
— A.W. Tozer

"To be effective the preacher's message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God's present voice to a particular people."
— A.W. Tozer

""To square the records, however, it should be said that if the Calvinist does not rise as high, he usually stays up longer. He places more emphasis on the Holy Scriptures which never change, while his opposite number (as the newspapers say) tends to judge his spiritual condition by the state of his feelings, which change constantly. This may be the reason that so many Calvinistic churches remain orthodox for centuries, at least in doctrine, while many churches of the Arminian persuasion often go liberal in one generation.""
— A.W. Tozer

"Any faith that must be supported by the evidence of the senses is not real faith."
— A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life)

"The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its source."
— A.W. Tozer

"God knows instantly and effortlessly all matter and all matters, all mind and every mind, all spirit and all spirits, all being and every being, all creaturehood and all creatures, every plurality and all pluralities, all law and every law, all relations, all causes, all thoughts, all mysteries, all enigmas, all feeling, all desires, every unuttered secret, all thrones and dominions, all personalities, all things visible and invisible in heaven and in earth, motion, space, time, life, death, good, evil, heaven, and hell."
— A.W. Tozer

" One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world's great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty. "
— A.W. Tozer

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."
— A.W. Tozer

"For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he is his deep heart conceives God to be like."
— A.W. Tozer

"Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightest word in any language is its word for God."
— A.W. Tozer

"Acquaint thyself with God."
— A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life)

"The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven't yet come to the end of themselves. We're still trying to give orders, and interfering with God's work within us. "
— A.W. Tozer

"Sometimes I go to God and say, "God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already. God’s already put me so far in de4bt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me. "
— A.W. Tozer

"Teach us, O God, that nothing is necessary to Thee. Were anything necessary to Thee that thing would be the measure of Thine imperfection: and how could we worship one who is imperfect? If nothing is necessary to Thee, then no one is necessary, and if no one, then not we. Thou dost seek us though Thou does not need us. We seek Thee because we need Thee, for in Thee we live and move and have our being. Amen."
— A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life)

"To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relationg to everything He has made, but He has no Necessary relation to anything outside of Himself. His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can dring to Him who is complete in himself."
— A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life)

"Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now."
— A.W. Tozer

"True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie."
— A.W. Tozer

"I am Thy servant to do Thy will, and that will is sweeter to me than position or riches or fame, and I choose it above all things on Earth or in Heaven."
— A.W. Tozer