Geoffrey Wood Quotes

The Bible is the one book we’ve most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.

~ Geoffrey Wood

I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.

~ Geoffrey Wood

I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn’t think to stop it?

~ Geoffrey Wood

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn’t mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.

~ Geoffrey Wood

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives —gratitude.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would’ve worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would’ve then better lead them on to happiness.

~ Geoffrey Wood

They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they’re quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But you’ll find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word “pursuit”. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don’t do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There’s too much wrong in there to even scratch at that!

~ Geoffrey Wood

I say “illusion” of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

~ Geoffrey Wood

As a rule, Americans are big on that word “choice” and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.

~ Geoffrey Wood

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble.

~ Geoffrey Wood

You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be ‘undemocratic’.

~ Geoffrey Wood

For example, your man might think: I don’t steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they’ve been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we’re headed right back toward The Virtues.

~ Geoffrey Wood

As a motivation —for humans, but Christians especially— guilt is always wrong and can never move them to do anything He wants of them. Never let them realize that.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they’re always either standing next to a hole or down in it.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you’ll ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to obey, but to feel less guilty, thus nothing about their souls will be reshaped.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don’t feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they’re stuck right where they started: Guilty.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.

~ Geoffrey Wood

With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.

~ Geoffrey Wood

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step inside it. And in a very real sense, we’ve already got them in Hell.

~ Geoffrey Wood

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.

~ Geoffrey Wood

They think virtues are man-made, only exist because they exist, but if no human had ever existed, The Virtues would persist for they hold their being from the very Presence of the Adversary Himself.

~ Geoffrey Wood

We’ve spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that’s precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Teach them the shame that tells the lie, “I am unforgivable,” when the truth is, “I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control.” Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Selling a new lie is easy, but not so with un-teaching an old truth.

~ Geoffrey Wood

In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

~ Geoffrey Wood