Top 49 Christian Wiman Quotes
#1. Herein lies the great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ's weakness equals a supernatural strength.
Christian Wiman
#2. Let us remember ... that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.
Christian Wiman
#3. It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him. We are facets of a work whose finished form we cannot imagine, though our imaginations, aided by grace, are the means - or at least one means - of its completion.
Christian Wiman
#4. 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
#5. The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else's suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your misery? Their tears are real, but they are not for you.
Christian Wiman
#6. Faith steals upon you like dew: some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxieties, ambitions, distractions.
Christian Wiman
#7. To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.
Christian Wiman
#8. How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?
Christian Wiman
#9. To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence.
Christian Wiman
#10. 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
#11. I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.
Christian Wiman
#13. Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.
Christian Wiman
#14. 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
#15. The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.
Christian Wiman
#16. Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.
Christian Wiman
#17. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.
Christian Wiman
#18. Friend once told me that she could wake up a Christian
Christian Wiman
#19. 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
#20. Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.
Christian Wiman
#22. 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
#23. Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.
Christian Wiman
#24. If he loved his life so much, how could he be happy that it was ending so early? The answer, I think, lies in that dynamic of life and death that I've just described, that capacity of dying into the life that one has loved rather than falling irrevocably away from it.
Christian Wiman
#25. Lord, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not. I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world - directly, immediately - yet I want nothing more.
Christian Wiman
#26. We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.
Christian Wiman
#27. I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.
Christian Wiman
#28. For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
and I will ride this tantrum back to God
Christian Wiman
#29. God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. "I think there is no light in the world / but the world," writes George Oppen. "And I think there is light.
Christian Wiman
#31. Christ is not alive now because he rose from the dead two thousand years ago. He rose from the dead two thousand years ago because he is alive right now.
Christian Wiman
#32. Silence is the language of faith. Action--be it church or charity, politics or poetry--is the translation.
Christian Wiman
#34. One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.
Christian Wiman
#35. If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand.
Christian Wiman
#36. Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.
Christian Wiman
#37. I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.
Christian Wiman
#38. It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, "maturity," suffering.
Christian Wiman
#39. It is the absoluteness of meaninglessness that Christianity, as I understand it, inhabits and inflects, the shock and stark violence of the cross that discloses the living Christ. Revelation, like creation, arises not merely out of nothingness but by means of it.
Christian Wiman
#40. If eternity touched you, if all the trappings of time and self were stripped away and you were all soul, if God "happened" to you - then isn't it possible that the experience could not be translated
Christian Wiman
#41. It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.
Christian Wiman
#42. I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.
Christian Wiman
#43. If Christianity is going to mean anything at all for us now, then the humanity of God cannot be a half measure.
Christian Wiman
#44. Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.
Christian Wiman
#45. And still: some who cry the name of Christ Live more remote from love Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.
Christian Wiman
#46. So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.
Christian Wiman
#48. Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.
Christian Wiman
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