Elisabeth Elliot was a Christian author and speaker. Profoundly inspirational Elisabeth Elliot quotes will challenge the way you think, and make your life worth living.
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Famous Elisabeth Elliot Quotes
If you believe in a God who controls the big things, you have to believe in a God who controls the little things.
God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful—severe mercies at times, but mercies all the same.
If you are married, then accept that. Accept the husband that God has given you. If you are single, accept your singleness and take it as if today was the last day of your life. Don’t be looking constantly to the future.
A wedding is a celebration of marriage, of an institution ordained by God at the creation of man, to be entered into with solemnity as well as with joy.
We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom he has given the breath of life. We die in order to live.
The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the Cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.
Fear arises when we imagine that everything depends on us.
Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship,‘in spirit and in truth.’ Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.
The way you keep your house, the way you organize your time, the care you take in your personal appearance, the things you spend your money on, all speak loudly about what you believe. The beauty of thy peace shines forth in an ordered life. A disordered life speaks loudly of disorder in the soul.
But you will find yourself disarmed utterly, and your accusing spirit transformed into loving forgiveness the moment you remember that you did, in fact, marry only a sinner, and so did he.
Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future, I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now.
A man must at times be hard as nails, willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman’s resentment like tenderness.
Don’t dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.
The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the Head of the Church. And the wife is there to bless and support and help him.
God has promised to supply all our needs. What we don’t have now, we don’t need now.
It is God to whom and with whom we travel, and while He is at the end of our journey, He is also at every stopping place.
Inspirational Elisabeth Elliot Quotes
When you don’t know what to do next, just do the thing in front of you.
When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.
No woman who has not learned to master herself can be trusted to submit willingly to her husband. And that word willingly means that she does not merely resign herself to something she cannot avoid. It means that by an act of her own will she gives herself.
Of one thing I am perfectly sure, God’s story never ends with ashes.
So, the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations— her gifts.
No marriage can survive without forgiveness. Marriage is a long term commitment between two sinners.
Things happen which would not happen without prayer. Let us not forget that.
By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.
There is nothing worth living for, unless it is worth dying for.
While I disparage the exercise of building one’s self-esteem, I indulge in it every time I imagine myself free from the defects I perceive in someone else.
Faith does not eliminate questions, but faith knows where to take them.
You are loved with an everlasting love, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
Virginity is something that can be offered to God.
I believe a woman, in order to be a good wife, must be—among other things—both sensual and maternal.
I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.
A woman ought to be honest with a man who shows interest in her.
Lord, break the chains that hold me to myself; free me to be your happy slave—that is, to be the happy foot washer of anyone today who needs his feet washed, his supper cooked, his faults overlooked, his work commended, his failure forgiven, his griefs consoled or his button sewed on. Let me not imagine that my love for You is very great if I am unwilling to do for a human being for something very small.
To me, a lady is not frilly, flouncy, flippant, frivolous, and fluff-brained, but she is gentle, she is gracious, she is godly, and she is giving. You and I have the gift of femininity. The more womanly we are, the more manly men will be, and the more God is glorified. Be women, be only women, be real women in obedience to God.
The Devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements—noise, hurry, and crowds. He will not allow quietness.
Top Elisabeth Elliot Quotes
Eve’s daughters are as flowers and none can ever say they are through unfolding. And what man can predict the consummate end of such a life when its ultimate center is Sharon’s Rose?
Unless a man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention? Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention? If, when the time has come for a commitment, he is not man enough to ask her to marry him, she should give him no reason to presume that she belongs to him.
God never denies us our heart’s desire, except to give us something better.
I remember what Jim wrote to me in one of his letters: ‘Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.’ And I think there are a lot of single women who are allowing their longing to slay the appetite of their living. They are not throwing their heart and soul into the will of God for today, because they are simply dying inside for something that God has not given them.
Throughout the millennia of human history, up until the past two decades or so, people took for granted that the differences between men and women were so obvious as to need no comment. They accepted the way things were. But, our easy assumptions have been assailed and confused, we have lost our bearings in a fog of rhetoric about something called equality, so that I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to belabor to educated people what was once perfectly obvious to the simplest peasant.
One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.
The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it’s going to be a lot better and a lot bigger.
You can never lose what you have offered to Christ.
The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.
Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but in the heart prepared to wait trustfully and quietly on Him who has all things safely in His hands.
Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men.
Leave it all in the hands that were wounded for you.
The will of God is not something you add to your life. It’s a course you choose. You either line yourself up with the Son of God, or you capitulate to the principle which governs the rest of the world.
We are women, and my plea is, let me be a woman—holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is.
I took it for granted that there must be a few men left in the world who had that kind of strength. I assumed that those men would also be looking for women with principle. I did not want to be among the marked-down goods on the bargain table, cheap because they’d been pawed over. Crowds collect there. It is only the few who will pay full price. ‘You get what you pay for.’
One way to begin to see how vastly indulgent we usually are is to fast. It is a long day that is not broken by the usual three meals. One finds out what an astonishing amount of time is spent in the planning, purchasing, preparing, eating, and cleaning up of meals.
Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself.
What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpent’s offer and had said to him instead, ‘Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be—let me be a woman?’
Teach me never to let the joy of what has been pale, the joy of what is.
The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian, makes me a different kind of woman.
To understand the meaning of womanhood, we have to start with God. If He is indeed ‘Creator of all things visible and invisible,’ He is certainly in charge of all things. Visible and invisible, stupendous and minuscule, magnificent and trivial. God has to be in charge of details if He is going to be in charge of the overall design.
God is God. Because He is God, He is worthy of my trust and obedience. I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will that is unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.
If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.
The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. ‘If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,’ Jesus said, ‘he will find his true self.’
I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are honestly able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray, ‘Thy will be done.’
We cannot give our hearts to God and keep our bodies to ourselves.
I have one desire now—to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it.
Everything, if given to God, can become your gateway to joy.
The world cries for men who are strong, strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer.
The question remains, ‘Is God paying attention? If so, why doesn’t He do something?’ I say He has, He did, He is doing something, and He will do something.
It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations so has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single, which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.
