Christian Wiman Quotes

Quotes about:

• Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color. This is why, even in moments of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still burn.

  Christian Wiman

  Color, Joy, Understanding

  "By Love We Are Led to God" by Christian Wiman, bulletin.hds.harvard.edu. 2012.

  50 Copy quote

• Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

  Christian Wiman

  Funny, Art, Paradox

  53 Copy quote

• 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 God, why hast thou forsaken me? (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.)

  Christian Wiman

  Christian, Jesus, Drinking

  11 Copy quote

• Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.

  Christian Wiman

  Order, May, Sometimes

  Christian Wiman (2013). “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer”, p.51, Macmillan

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• 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 its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

  Christian Wiman

  Home, Ambition, Anxiety

  17 Copy quote

• To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence.

  Christian Wiman

  Alive, Existence, Feels

  20 Copy quote

• 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 matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

  Christian Wiman

  Art, Believe, Past

  Christian Wiman (2013). “Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet”, p.57, Copper Canyon Press

  11 Copy quote

• Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.

  Christian Wiman

  Spiritual, Mean, Imagination

  Christian Wiman (2013). “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer”, p.51, Macmillan

  16 Copy quote

• 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 often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.

  Christian Wiman

  Writing, Self, People

  13 Copy quote

• 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 for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.

  Christian Wiman

  Reading, People, Quality

  17 Copy quote

• 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 them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.

  Christian Wiman

  Believe, Reality, Use

  Christian Wiman (2013). “Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet”, p.161, Copper Canyon Press

  9 Copy quote

• Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

  Christian Wiman

  Garden, Religion, Backyards

  Christian Wiman (2013). “Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet”, p.147, Copper Canyon Press

  53 Copy quote

• 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 speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.

  Christian Wiman

  Artist, People, Mind

  Interview with Anthony Domestico, www.commonwealmagazine.org. April 16, 2014.

  13 Copy quote

• 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 have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as résumé. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to.

  Christian Wiman

  Eye, Successful, Views

  "My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer". Book by Christian Wiman, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 2, 2013.

  10 Copy quote

• We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

  Christian Wiman

  Should, Conform, Suspicious

  9 Copy quote

• 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 we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

  Christian Wiman

  Self, Giving, Doubt

  8 Copy quote

• Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

  Christian Wiman

  Wonder

  4 Copy quote

• 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, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.

  Christian Wiman

  Writing, Discipline, World

  4 Copy quote

• God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.

  Christian Wiman

  Suffering, God Is With Us

  "My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer". Book by Christian Wiman (p. 155), www.huffingtonpost.com. 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• 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 and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to.... For if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.

  Christian Wiman

  Pain, Fall, Believe

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• It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.

  Christian Wiman

  Perception, Different, Demand

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

  Christian Wiman

  Mind, Weakness, Essentials

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• I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond.

  Christian Wiman

  Fall, Wish, Terror

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• I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

  Christian Wiman

  Real, Thinking, Doe

  Source: bigthink.com

  9 Copy quote

• 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 respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.

  Christian Wiman

  Art, Pain, Believe

  Interview with Caitlin Mackenzie, therumpus.net. October 7, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

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