Conversions Quotes

True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways. ~ James P. Carse

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.

Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses? ~ David Brin

If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing. ~ Mitch Kapor

People go through three conversions: The conversion of their head, their heart, and their pocketbook. Unfortunately, not all at the same time. ~ Martin Luther

The campaign of anti-Islamic slander was so successful that to this day some textbooks in European and American schools refer to Muhammad as having epilepsy, the Qur'an as being copied from Bible, Muslim armies forcing conversions on people (by the sword), and Islam as being against science and learning. All of these are quite untrue, and enlightened Western authors from Arnold Toynbee and Bertrand Russell to Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito have been dispelling these myths on book after book for decades; nevertheless, the message hasn't reached the masses, who still believe numerous myths concerning Islam. ~ Yahiya Emerick

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones - gliding like a Satan - well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes - feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, bl ~ Saul Bellow

Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite. ~ Michel Foucault

And the heart of it is this. Real conversions are marked by the fruit of the Spirit, not the gifts of the Spirit. Regeneration has a tell, and that tell is love. As John Owen noted, the gifts of the Spirit are not the saving grace of the Spirit.11 And the love we are talking about is not a momentary thing. Love is not a walk around the block, but rather a long-haul trucking trip. ~ Douglas Wilson

False conversions are a wart on the face of Christian evangelism. ~ Kevin Roose

I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here. ~ Susan Jacoby

they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That's why atheist humanism - the basis of any 'pluralist society' - is doomed. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Seal the Deal Tip: When you deliver information the way the other person wants to receive it, you increase your conversion rates. Notice if someone is talking in short, concise bullet points – then deliver information the same way and watch your conversions soar. ~ Lisa A. Mininni

Don't optimize for conversions, optimize for revenue. ~ Neil Patel

Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions. ~ Hans Zinsser

And believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women (Acts 5:14)- So not only was there Holy Ghost boldness and Holy Ghost power and Holy Ghost conviction, but also Holy Ghost conversions. ~ Oswald J. Smith

Islam began as a tribal religion, whereas Christianity began more as an individual or family religion. Christianity struck out from Palestine, converting one person or one family at a time. After the initial successes and conquests by Mohammed and his tribe, conversions were as much military as spiritual. Mohammed was both a political and military genius and used his success and charisma to convince the superstitious tribes around him that he had Allah on his side. As such, the sword was the instrument of persuasion. ~ Darrel Ray

Like deathbed conversions, last paragraph soul-saving does not convince. ~ Rosellen Brown

It is a very solemn delusion when ministers think they are prospering, and yet do not hear of conversions. ~ Charles Spurgeon

A Christianity that does not have as its primary focus the deepening of passions for God is a false Christianity, no matter how zealously it seeks conversions or how forcefully it advocates righteous behavior. ~ J.D. Greear

She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after. ~ Iris Murdoch

There are three conversions necessary (for the Christian life): the conversion of the heart, the mind, and the purse. ~ Martin Luther

We tell our portfolio companies that it's really important to be metrics-driven and to track their conversions. It goes back to building that scalable sales model. ~ Devon McDonald

We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation. ~ Thomas Merton

If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why - and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions - did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it? ~ Christopher Hitchens

If we want revivals, we must revive our reverence for the Word of God. If we want conversions, we must put more of God's Word into our sermons.8 His gospel preaching was grounded ~ Steven J. Lawson

I know this may sound like an excuse," he said. "But tensor functions in higher differential topology, as exemplified by application of the Gauss-Bonnett Theorem to Todd Polynomials, indicate that cohometric axial rotation in nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by random inference derived from translational equilibrium aggregates, array in obverse transitional order the thermodynamic characteristics of a transactional plasma undergoing negative entropy conversions."
"Why don't you just shut up," said Hardesty. ~ Mark Helprin

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it. ~ Gregory Maguire

He seeks conversions, not just votes. If ~ Sam Frizell

A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound - as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued - a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it - the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe - that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross. ~ Tom Holland

I owe everything to the gift of Pentecost. For fifty days the facts of the Gospel were complete, but no conversions were recorded. Pentecost registered three thousand souls. It is by fire that a holy passion is kindled in the soul whereby we live the life of God. The soul's safety is in its heat. Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, make for a Church without power. ~ Samuel Chadwick

Marketing and promoting doesn't come down to the likes, the pins, the plus ones, the followers, the fans, the friends, the views, or the plays online. Marketing and promoting comes down to the conversions. ~ Loren Weisman

You can hope and wish and pray that those things are legitimate conversions and that [Hillary Clinton] now is a different candidate, a person with a different philosophy. That's something that, you know, sometimes, yes, it's hard to believe. ~ Jonathan Tasini

It's not a religion, it's a relationship!'
Without the religion, without the archaic and flawed holy texts, there wouldn't be anything for you to manufacture a 'relationship' with. Without the wars and forced conversions key to the religion's spread across the globe, it may have died out long ago like so many others have. If that were the case, you wouldn't know the characters of Jesus or God or Muhammad or any of the tales and myths associated with a particular faith. Religions concern themselves with preserving and worshiping these myths as realities, without regard to substantial evidence to the contrary. ~ David G. McAfee

Of two quite lofty things, measure and moderation, it is best never to speak. A few know their force and significance, from the mysterious paths of inner experiences and conversions: they honor in them something quite godlike, and are afraid to speak aloud. All the rest hardly listen when they are spoken about, and think the subjects under discussion are tedium and mediocrity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If the doctrine of a church is that people outside of Christ will face an eternity in hell, yet the culture is one that does not celebrate conversions or evangelistic witness, the culture of the church will contradict its doctrinal stance by continually focusing inward instead of outward. ~ Matt Chandler

I understand the bad rap that 3-D is getting because the conversions are crappy and because the films aren't designed for 3-D. It's a completely different medium. ~ Alfonso Cuaron

And they would go not with an eye to gaining converts but with an eye to meeting need. The conversions would take care of themselves. ~ David Wilkerson