Ravi Zacharias Quotes

The mocker will not have the last laugh. You see, dancing on the grave of an extinguished Christianity is farcical at best. Because the grave is empty. And the one who knows the way out of the grave sits in the heavens and laughs.

In a post-modern culture we need an apologetic that is felt and seen because if post-moderns are not feeling it, they are not believing it.

How have we come to a place in society where millions of babies can be slaughtered and disposed of in the name of progress? Shocking but real.

Marriage means handing over yourself, your body, your future, your keeping to the one whom you dearly love, although this person may, in many ways, remain a stranger. This tremendous act of faith is something that can unlock in each lover powers of compassion, generosity, joy, passion, fidelity and hope that no one guessed was even there. That is why the confidence of young lovers is not foolish or arrogant, but an expression of a basic fact in human experience that the greatest of human gifts are set to work only when people are prepared to risk everything and first you risk it before God.

There are no unique postures and times and limitations that restrict our access to God. My relationship with God is intimate and personal. The Christian does not go to the temple to worship. The Christian takes the temple with him or her. Jesus lifts us beyond the building and pays the human body the highest compliment by making it His dwelling place, the place where He meets with us. Even today He would overturn the tables of those who make it a marketplace for their own lust, greed and wealth.

Beginning well is a momentary thing; finishing well is a lifelong thing

Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance. Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth.

Where the eye is focused, there the imagination finds its raw material. The right focus must be won at immense cost and discipline. Train the eye to see the good, and the imagination will follow suit.

Conviction is not merely an opinion. It is something rooted so deeply in the conscience that to change a conviction would be to change the very essence of who you are.

Sometimes the very presence of God is barred by our presuppositions and our intense and constant desire for triumph.

Capturing the beauty of the conversion of the water into wine, the poet Alexander Pope said, "The conscious water saw its Master and blushed." That sublime description could be reworked to explain each one of these miracles. Was it any different in principle for a broken body to mend at the command of its Maker? Was it far-fetched for the Creator of the universe, who fashioned matter out of nothing, to multiply bread for the crowd? Was it not within the power of the One who called all the molecules into existence to interlock them that they might bear His footsteps?

The character of Jesus has not only been the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive in its practice, and has exerted so deep an influence, that it may be truly said that the simple record of three years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.

Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

An expenditure of words without income of ideas will lead to intellectual bankruptcy.

It is easier to hide behind philosophical arguments, heavily footnoted for effect, than it is to admit our hurts, our confusions, our loves, and our passions in the marketplace of life's heartfelt transactions.

We all want Canaan without going through the wilderness.

Wonder is retained by wise pondering.

I came to Him because I did not know which way to turn. I remained with Him because there is no other way I wish to turn. I came to Him longing for something I did not have. I remain with Him because I have something I will not trade. I came to Him as a stranger. I remain with Him in the most intimate of friendships. I came to Him unsure about the future. I remain with Him certain about my destiny. I came amid the thunderous cries of a culture that has 330 million deities. I remain with Him knowing that truth cannot be all-inclusive.

Having the answers is not essential to living. What is essential is the sense of God's presence during dark seasons of questioning.

The world is larger and more beautiful than my little struggle.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

The older we become, the more difficult it is to fill our hearts with wonder. Only God is big enough to keep filling us with wonder.

Time is the brush of God, as he paints his masterpiece on the heart of humanity.

When you find your definitions in God, you find the very purpose for which you were created. Put your hand into God's hand, know His absolutes, demonstrate His love, present His truth, and the message of redemption and transformation will take hold.

To allow God to be God we must follow Him for who He is and what He intends, and not for what we want and what we prefer.

In India, there is a saying that you can touch your nose directly or you can touch your nose the long way around. You need to go the long way around to reach some people.

If truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.

Even though the search for meaning is debunked today, the cries of the human heart can be smothered for only so long. In these yearnings, the search for significance and fulfillment continues.

The loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has just let you down.

It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? One of the most dangerous and terrifying trends in America today is the disregard for character as a central necessity in a leader's credentials. The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil.

I have absolutely no doubt that if you are a praying Christian, your faith in God is what is carrying you, through both the good times and the hard times. However, if you are not a praying person, you are carrying your faith - you are trying to make your faith work for you apart from your source of power - and trying to carry the infinite is very exhausting.

Love is as much a question of the will as it is of the emotion. And if you WILL to love somebody, you can.

What we need is not a religion that is right where we are right, but one that is right where we are wrong.

In churches, we live with the danger of one-way verbal traffic.

There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny.

You see misery, you see misfortune, you see pain, you see suffering. It's all part of the fatalistic way of looking at life.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.

An argument may remove doubt, but only the Holy Spirit can convict of truth.

We are redefining terms and rewriting laws and removing fences everywhere you turn, and we seem to think we can do that with impunity.

We do not live so that we can eat, nor do we just eat so that we can live. Life is worth living in and of itself. Life cannot be satisfied when it is lived out as a consuming entity. When it is filled by that which satisfies a hunger that is both physical and spiritual in a mutuality that sustains both without violation of either, only then can life be truly fulfilling.

When you say there's too much evil in this world you assume there's good. When you assume there's good, you assume there's such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But if you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral Law Giver, but that's Who you're trying to disprove and not prove. Because if there's no moral Law Giver, there's no moral law. If there's no moral law, there's no good. If there's no good, there's no evil. What is your question?

At the universities I visit, the exclusivity of Christ is challenged in every open forum - "How can you possibly talk about one God or one way when there are so many good options?"

Even as you wrestle with the ideas of an opponent, you must keep the dignity of the opponent intact.

You can't take treasured beliefs from the past and mock them.

Atheism is an exercise in intellectual contempt.

The person who demands a sign and at the same time has already determined that anything that cannot be explained scientifically is meaningless is not merely stacking the deck; he is losing at his own game.

All religions, plainly and simply, cannot be true. Some beliefs are false, and we know them to be false. So it does no good to put a halo on the notion of tolerance as if everything could be equally true. To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if the denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true.

You cannot really have the world and hold on to it. It is all too temporary and the more you try to hold on to it, the more it actually holds you. By contrast, the more you hold on to the true and the good, the more you are free to really live.