Christian Wiman Quotes

24 quotes in 557 categories

• Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.
• Art is so often better at theology than theology is.
• Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.
• What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives…
• I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world,…
• Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.
• Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a…
• There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in…
• One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity…
• At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use…
• There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds…
• One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.
• God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.
• I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and…
• It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers…
• The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or…
• I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my…
• I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no…
• Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.
• I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear…

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