Grant Baker > Grant's Quotes

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.”
― D.L. Moody

“At the end of the day, what qualifies people to be called “leaders” is their capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results.”
― Kerry Patterson, Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change

“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Whether or not the Christian faith is true is now irrelevant. All that matters is that to more and more people in the modern world it no longer seems true.”
― Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy's Plot to Undermine the Church

“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. ”
― William Ralph Inge

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
― Albert Einstein

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast!
And when I run I feel his pleasure.”
― Eric Liddell

“Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism

“Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism

“Christ died"--that is history; "Christ died for our sins"--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
― E.O. Wilson

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”
― John Naisbitt, Megatrends

“A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“But if you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn. And the effects are cumulative.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.”
― J. Gresham Machen

“What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?”
― J. Gresham Machen, The Christian Faith in the Modern World

“What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.”
― J. Gresham Machen

“It is true that historic Christianity is in conflict at many points with the collectivism of the present day; it does emphasize, against the claims of society, the worth of the individual soul. It provides for the individual a refuge from all the fluctuating currents of human opinion, a secret place of meditation where a man can come alone into the presence of God. It does give a man courage to stand, if need be, against the world; it resolutely refuses to make of the individual a mere means to an end, a mere element in the composition of society. It rejects altogether any means of salvation which deals with men in a mass; it brings the individual face to face with his God.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism

“The Church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Culture

“The narration of the facts is history; the narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. "Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried"--that is history. "He loved me and gave Himself for me"--that is doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive Church.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism

“The truth is that the life-purpose of Jesus discovered by modern liberalism is not the life purpose of the real Jesus, but merely represents those elements in the teaching of Jesus--isolated and misinterpreted--which happen to agree with the modern program. It is not Jesus, then, who is the real authority, but the modern principle by which the selection within Jesus' recorded teaching has been made. Certain isolated ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas.”
― J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism

“People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool--even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs. Now, obviously they don't agree with every idea; they simply do their best to ensure that all ideas find their way into the open.”
― Kerry Patterson, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

“Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.”
― K.J. Parker, Devices and Desires

“Truth can well out of a man like blood from a wound, and it can be just as disconcerting to look at.”
― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool

“To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.”
― Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance