D.A. Carson Quotes

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.

NBC's priorities are Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno, and then there's me.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

A plan that everyone dislikes for different reasons is a success. A plan everyone dislikes for the same reason is a failure. A plan that everyone likes for the same reason is an act of God!

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.

We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.

A library is infinity under a roof.

I am always more interested in what I am about to do than what I have already done.

The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.

We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray.

The No. 1 question I get from everybody is, 'How did you make it?' I'm like, Don't worry about making it. There is no making it. Just be happy.

You don’t have to be perfect to be pretty.

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced.

If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented.

Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for?

The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.

Don't let anyone turn you into a slave. You're a slave if you let the media tell you that sports and entertainment are more important than developing your brain.

Happiness is.....finding two olives in your martini when youre hungry.

Either worrying drives out prayer, or prayer drives out worrying.

There is a tendency of people to try to make you believe only a few people are smart. As a brain surgeon, I know better than that.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

If the text is God's Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience.

Love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.

Last night, it was so cold, the flashers in New York were only describing themselves.

You'll see everything from gold teeth to hood ornaments. It's almost like Halloween during August.

Successful people don't have fewer problems. They have determined that nothing will stop them from going forward.

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he's been accepted to an expensive college.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.