Top 32 Spufford Quotes

#1. We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #46782
#2. The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #55608
#3. I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #293092
#4. Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #396102
#5. I was never argued out of faith; it was much more passive than that - and I wasn't argued back in, either.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #416116
#6. He too had plans... he wasn't embarrassed by the idea of carefully thinking through what would be necessary to achieve them. You made a picture of the life you wanted to have, and then you worked back from there to the present.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #419941
#7. We are supposed to do our fallible, failing best to perceive the other bad people as kin.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #455978
#8. In a hundred years, Christianity will have mutated into something utterly unpredictable which, nevertheless, we'd recognize immediately. And same-sex marriage will be one of the fine old God-given traditions that conservatives leap to defend.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #502001
#9. Some people ask nowadays what kind of a religion it is that chooses an instrument of torture for its symbol, as if the cross on churches must represent some kind of endorsement. The answer is: one that takes the existence of suffering seriously.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #504323
#10. By now the night tastes of nothing but ash. But nicotine substitutes for food, nicotine substitutes for sleep, and there is so little time left for the future, once all the demands of the present are taken care of.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #549887
#11. What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #731122
#12. It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of membership, of participation in the vast synchronised swim of institutions.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #762319
#13. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #824183
#14. Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #876455
#15. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday, I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #896347
#16. I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #950208
#17. Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #982864
#18. If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1038790
#19. You never came out the way you came in.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1156770
#20. Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1202112
#21. Churches are vessels of hush, as well as everything else they are, and when I block out the distractions of vision, the silence is almost shockingly loud.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1304139
#22. What is the tactful, the effective way of announcing that your life's work has been wasted?

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1314019
#23. It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1361554
#24. What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1475228
#25. There have been low moments before, but Christianity is an incredibly adaptable organism, using different parts of its repertoire to mutate into new ecological niches, yet preserving intact its story of grace, of love improbably triumphant.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1475437
#26. When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1485254
#27. Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I'm able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1597005
#28. You don't have to become an investment banker as a way of demonstrating that education has worked for you. But librarians have to believe in the values of high culture. Not just high culture but middle culture, low culture, kinds of exciting eye-catching crap of all kinds. Everyone needs that.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1622049
#29. The best that can be done is to love for the sake of it, and to keep sorrow company.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1651935
#30. Without faith, there'd be nothing but indifferent material forces at work. It's only when the idea of events having an author is introduced that the universe becomes cruel, as opposed to merely heavy, or fast-moving, or prone to unpredictable acceleration.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1722646
#31. We're the league of the guilty, after all, not the league of the shortly-to-become-good. We are a work in progress. We will always be a work in progress. We will always fail, and it will always matter.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1732715
#32. God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

Francis Spufford

Spufford Quotes #1814588

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