Joseph Sittler famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

A believer is an evangelist primarily by who he is and how he lives-not by what he says. What he says is important; but unless his speaking tallies with what he is and does, he had better keep quiet.
-- Joseph Sittler

#Important #Doe #Quiet
God is not identified with the world, for he made it; but God is not separate from His world, either. For He made it.
-- Joseph Sittler

#World #Creation #Made
I do not believe that our relationship to the earth is liable to change for the better until it gets catastrophically worse. Our record indicates that we can walk with our eyes wide open straight into sheer destruction if there is a profit on the way-and that seems to me to be what we are doing now. I have no great expectation that human cussedness will somehow be quickly modified and turned into generosity or that humanity's care of the earth will improve much. But I do go around planting trees on the campus.
-- Joseph Sittler

#Believe #Eye #Generosity
I have never been able to entertain a God-idea which was not integrally related to the fact of chipmunks, squirrels, hippopotamuses, galaxies, and light years.
-- Joseph Sittler

#Squirrels #Light #Years
Augustine said that we were all born into the world of "common grace" [i.e., available to all]. Before one is baptized, or even if one never is, such grace meets one in God's creation. There is grace in the pear tree that blooms and blushes. There is common grace in the sea (that massive cleanliness which we are proceeding to corrupt), in the fact that there was, before we laid hands on it, clean air. Our task is to appreciate that grace.
-- Joseph Sittler

#Sea #Air #Hands
On the first page of the Bible there is an instance of how literalism is but an invitation to transcend the image to which literalism points. That first page is not geology, biology or paleontology; it is high religion. For there we are told who we are in terms of our constititutive text. And if we could understand that, we would worrying about whether the antelopes or the cantaloupes came in a certain order.
-- Joseph Sittler

#Order #Worry #Firsts

Your career, interests and relationships are important, but they are only important insofar as they lead you toward a deeper understanding of yourself. Otherwise, they are irrelevant.
Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn't saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.
Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information.
But I have always said that it's important we must make sure that justice is at all time be maintained.
Let's stop somebody from doing something! Everybody does too much.
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy.
Yeah, I want to be liked, obviously. Everybody does.
The quiet sense of something lost
Prayer [is] the quiet, persistent living of our life of desire and faith in the presence of our God.

Joseph Sittler famous quotes

You may also like: