Witness Quotes

I am nurtured within the womb of universal consciousness. It supports my developing awareness as I witness, engage, learn, create, exchange.

~ Jay Woodman

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

~ John Updike

Life writes the poetry, but it will always call for witnesses and scribes alike to tattoo its echoes upon the ghosts of trees.

~ Ged Thompson ~Poet

As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative.

~ Tim Hetherington

We never realize the power of real love unless we witness or experience a transaction, because real love costs.

~ Eric Samuel Timm

My Universe, crashing into yours, was the most beautiful accident this creation had ever witnessed.

~ Akshay Vasu

Confessions are meant to reveal universal truths through specific examples.

~ Yishai Schwartz

Witnessing honesty frightens some people because they haven't known authenticity in their own life.

~ Bryant Mcgill

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. -

~ Anonymous

Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.

~ Daniel H. Wilson

But witnesses incur responsibilities, as anyone who has ever seen a traffic accident and had to go to court to testify, knows. In the new world of globally televised war crimes, the defence of 'not knowing,' or neutrality, will dissolve for everyone. To be a witness or bystander is not a value-free choice but, inadvertently, a moral position; and in this sense the 'guilt' of people who live with the memory of crimes committed by members of their families, or communities, has been unwittingly extended to everyone who watches appalling pictures on the news.

~ Erna Paris

Anyone can perform good deeds for an audience, the best among us do their greatest work when no one is present to bear witness.

~ Ken Poirot

When sinners judge, God takes the stand.

~ Toba Beta

We're Christians. We have to care what people think. The appearance of wrongdoing, remember? I'm not going to move in with you had have people think we're living in sin. What sort of witness would that be?

~ Francine Rivers

Hey, ghosts are nothing to laugh at! Whether or not you believe in them, they’re out there. I’ve seen them. I’ve even heard them.

~ Jason Medina

Weak hearts will be strengthened, and drooping saints will be revived as they listen to our songs of deliverance. Their doubts and fears will be rebuked, as we teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The old adage that ‘there are two sides to every story’ is not true. There is a story for every storyteller.

~ Kenneth Eade

None of these apparent sightings interested Hawksmoor, since it was quite usual for members of the public to come forward with such accounts and to describe unreal figures who took on the adventitious shape already suggested by newspaper accounts. There were even occasions when a number of people would report sightings of the same person, as if a group of hallucinations might create their own object which then seemed to hover for a while in the streets of London. And Hawksmoor knew that if he held a reconstruction of the crime by the church, yet more people would come forward with their own versions of time and event; the actual killing then became blurred and even inconsequential, a flat field against which others painted their own fantasies of murderer and victim.

~ Peter Ackroyd

Slowly, I'm beginning to realise that what happened to me wasn't my fault, that I was taken advantage of by a group of vile, twisted men.

~ Girl A

If the church is the body of Christ [who was disguised in servant form], why would we think the world would be able to pick us out of a crowd of other well-meaning organizations?

~ Mark Galli

For his own unfathomable reasons, God chooses to disguise himself when he comes to this planet, and there have been few disguises better than the church.

~ Mark Galli

There are casualties in war. Those who don’t make it back to a place of sound hopes and dreams. Some take on their demons alone. They are deceived into fearlessness and trampled by the hooves of their oppressor. Besides intervention, there is little justice for the thousands-upon-thousands hacked to pieces all around us. How dare we try to take life to the next level. Instead of merely protecting ourselves or scrounging up our next meal, we have the audacity to hope for something more—a witness for our lives who will survive alongside us.

~ Christopher Hawke

I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.

~ Saul Bellow

On the stand, I asked the witness, “What's your occupation?”“Make-up artist.”“Objection!” I replied, “Lack of foundation.

~ Natalya Vorobyova

All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be 'Girl A' - the key witness in the trial that finally saw my abusers locked up. Girl A - the girl in the newspaper stories who had been through the most hideous experience imaginable. When I read those stories, I felt like I was reading about somebody else, another girl who was subjected to the depths of human depravity. But it wasn't. It was about me. I am Girl A.

~ Girl A

I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.

~ Bruce R. Mcconkie

If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?

~ K.l. Toth

People will continue to doubt you until they witness first hand the results of what you have mastered.

~ Paul Bamikole

To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

~ Peter A. Levine

Being here to witness the beauty, to learn, to be astonished, to love - is enough. Being able to create in addition is a delightful honour.

~ Jay Woodman

On an individual and corporate level the church is learning to love and accept people where they are at on their journey along with providing opportunities and experiences for them to engage relationally with other Christians along with exploring the implications of Christ's teachings. I am a big proponent of the concept that Christianity is more “caught that taught” and that a person’s meaningful involvement in the process is critical to them experiencing the power of the gospel in their lives. This meaningful involvement takes time and persevering love.

~ Gary Rohrmayer

Your enemies are not to be destroyed, grant them longevity to witness your success.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

~ Jodi Picoult

The witch-hunt narrative is now the conventional wisdom about these cases. That view is so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that there would seem to be nothing left to say about these cases. But a close examination of the witch hunt canon leads to some unsettling questions: Why is there so little in the way of academic scholarship about these cases? Almost all of the major witch-hunt writings have been in magazines, often without any footnotes to verify or assess the claims made. Why hasn't anyone writing about these cases said anything about how difficult they are to research? There are so many roadblocks and limitations to researching these cases that it would seem incumbent on any serious writer to address the limitations of data sources. Many of these cases seem to have been researched in a manner of days or weeks. Nevertheless, the cases are described in a definitive way that belies their length and complexity, along with the inherent difficulty in researching original trial court documents. This book is based on the first systematic examination of court records in these cases.

~ Ross Cheit

Have you heard of the Children of Mae?”“The cult?” She knew of a religious group whose members went door to door, preaching the benefits of self-discipline—abstinence, celibacy or monogamy, vegetarianism—pretty much anything fun was prohibited. They had never come to Vesper’s house because her father was a butcher and probably pretty low on their list of possible converts.

~ Colleen Chen

Jason (Elam, a Christian) is the kid in high school who gets along equally well with the jocks, the brains, the geeks, and the slackers, and influences their behavior.

~ Stefan Fatsis

If you find yourself in an interrogation room, you will probably do better if you have not spent a bit of time kneeling on a blood-soaked carpet. And it would be especially good if you didn't have any of that blood smeared on your clothing and your hands. I'm just saying. A word to the wise.

~ Victoria Abbott

When the author admits to Christians that he was not a Christian himself, he says their dialogue became distant and rehearsed, like a pitch for Ginsu knives.

~ Kevin Roose