His Backbone Quotes & Sayings

J ESUS PRIMARY MISSION IS summed Up In This One Line: "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). That was Jesus' assignment; it was the disciples' assignment, and it is your assignment as well. God's purpose in saving you was not simply to rescue you and keep you busy until He shipped you off to Heaven. His purpose was much bigger; He commissioned you to demonstrate the will of God, "on earth as it is in heaven," helping to transform this planet into a place that is radiant and saturated with His power and presence. This is the very backbone of the Great Commission, and it should define your life and mine. — Bill Johnson

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Terrible worm in an iron cocoon, as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse's backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Pamela looked at his retreating back with admiration. He represented the backbone of Britain at this moment. A skinny, awkward bookworm, yet determined to keep going for as long as it took to defeat Hitler. — Rhys Bowen

Nobody would ever believe that you had any interest in me." "I could make them believe. Not one in ten thousand would have figured out what you just did. Not one. I could make everyone believe in the woman who saw that - quiet, yes, and perhaps a little shy in company - " Minnie made a rude noise, but he waved her quiet. "You have steel for your backbone and a rare talent for seeing what is plainly in front of your face. I could make everyone see that." His eyes were intense, boring into her. There was no escaping him, it seemed. He dropped his voice. "I could make everyone see you. — Courtney Milan

You saw a ghost, didn't you?" he said.
To my relief, I managed to laugh. "Hate to break it to you, but
there's no such thing as ghosts."
Huh."
His gaze traveled around the laundry room, like a cop searching
for an escaped convict. When he turned that
piercing look on me, its intensity sucked the backbone out of me.
What do you see, Chloe?"
I -I-I don't s-s-s-"
Slow down." He snapped the words, impatient. "What do they
look like? Do they talk to you?"
You really want to know?"
Yeah."
I chewed my lip, then lifted onto my tiptoes. He bent to listen.
They wear white sheets with big eye holes. And they say 'Boo!'" I
glowered up at him. "Now get out of my
way."
I expected him tosneer. Cross his arms and say, Make me, little girl.His lips twitched and I steeled myself, then I realized he was smiling.Laughing at me.
He stepped aside. I swept past him to the stairs. — Kelley Armstrong

I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero ... I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally. — George Bernard Shaw

That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. — Albert Einstein

Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy. — Fulton J. Sheen

Once Errol righted himself into some semblance of horsemanship, they set off at an easy canter. That is, the other horses set off at a canter, while Errol's horse settled into a teeth-shattering trot. After a hundred paces he could feel Horace's backbone through the saddle. The other riders pulled ahead without a backward glance, leaving him to his four-footed torture. — Patrick W. Carr

Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken — M T Anderson

He terrifies me, Aunt Peg." I don't have the backbone to say it to her face. "Oliver is such a self-contained person. He's always so calm, so at ease, so refined. I'm the one who's always losing my mind over nothing. He is unbelievably amazing in a way I don't know if I can reciprocate. His voice is calm and patient. It makes me feel like he will sit me down and tell me everything's going to be okay. And his eyes. Have you seen his eyes? They're so kind and gentle. — Elisa Marie Hopkins

At the Sandwich Islands, Kaahumanu, the gigantic old dowager queen - a woman of nearly four hundred pounds weight, and who is said to be still living at Mowee - was accustomed, in some of her terrific gusts of temper, to snatch up an ordinary sized man who had offended her, and snap his spine across her knee. Incredible as this may seem, it is a fact. While at Lahainaluna - the residence of this monstrous Jezebel - a humpbacked wretch was pointed out to me, who, some twenty-five years previously, had had the vertebrae of his backbone very seriously discomposed by his gentle mistress. The — Herman Melville

Miles watched the evening shadows flowing up along the backbone of the Dendarii range, high and massive in the distance. How small those mountains looked from space! Little wrinkles on the skin of a globe he could cover with his hand, all their crushing mass made invisible. Which was illusory, distance or nearness? Distance, Miles decided. Distance was a damned lie. Had his father known this? Miles suspected so. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Poor innocent little lambie," God said, shaking his head. "Telion. I made you people in My Image. I swear, and drink, and have sex. I even burp and fart, but I damn sure don't snore. You seriously think I mind if people I made to reflect me act like I do? Not hardly. And there's another bone I have to pick with you lot. Know why I don't mess with Amrontil for the most part? I'll tell you. You sorry fuckers forgot how to talk to Me and you completely fucking rejected My gifts. You grovel and beg and plead like you're talking to My asshole Brother Gabriel. Makes Me want to barf. Come on, people, get a backbone! And fucking get laid, would you? Uptight repressed bastards. — Marie Brown

His basic message is meant to put steel in their backbone and to encourage them to run the race and seek the prize of Heaven. He comes to remind them that they have an enemy who seeks to destroy them.
4. — John Bunyan

But in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone. — Joseph Conrad

Keatsian odes or reflective elegies which had formed the backbone of his early work ('At Grass', 'Church Going', 'An Arundel Tomb', 'The Whitsun Weddings', 'Here', 'Dockery and Son'). Now he resumed the sequence, and over the next six years would complete four more, all focused directly or indirectly on the theme of death: 'The Building', 'The Old Fools', 'Show Saturday' and finally 'Aubade'. — James Booth

It is an open question whether or not "liberal democracy" in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives. This is precisely the question that Vaclav Havel, then newly elected as president of Czechoslovakia, posed in an address to the U.S. Congress. "We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics," he said. "We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions - if they are to be moral - is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success." What Havel is saying is that it is not enough for his nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and he worries that Technopoly provides no answer. To — Neil Postman

Our bodyguard is a born-again Christian with a father complex, a drinking problem, intellectual limitations and not enough backbone to do his military service with honor. In short, a guy we should be pleased is going to be reelected today. — Jo Nesbo

Forest is the backbone of the O-fers. He pitches, bats cleanup, collects the fees, makes all the pre game reminder calls, fills out the lineup card, and is the undisputed (though unspoken) team captain. Few things inspire like watching Forest round third in the late innings with a head full of steam and two bad knees, his spare tire heaving violently beneath his snug jersey, just as the second basemen is fielding the relay. "Run, Forest, run!" We yell, from the dugout. It never gets old. — Jonathan Evison

I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world. — Herman Melville

Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. — Herman Melville

A true leader must have enough backbone to stand alone, even when the crowd wants to take the easy road home. A true leader cannot be dependent on companionship for his or her security, but must learn to trust in God alone. Singleness can give us the kind of backbone - courage, confidence, and leadership skills that an effective Christian must learn. — Leslie Ludy

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily bravo at the bravura of his being! — Robert Farrar Capon

He was sixty years old; his backbone had been as straight as his gun; his spirit-as straight as his backbone. — Ayn Rand

How far could you trace back such a chain, he wondered, past the Harmon girl being chosen that night to bring his food, past the tree shattering a man's backbone due to a badly notched trunk, past that to an axe unsharpened because a man drank too much the night before, past that to why the man had gotten drunk in the first place? Was it something you never found the end to? Or was there no chain at all, just a moment when you did or didn't step close to a young woman and let you fingers brush a fall of blonde hair behind her ears, did or did not lean to that uncovered ear and tell her that you found her quite fetching." ~G. Pemberton (58) — Ron Rash

I co-own the ranch with my brother, and he and his wife are really the backbone of the operation. — Bill Pullman

Brigan was saying her name, and he was sending her a feeling. It was courage and strength, and something else too, as if he were standing with her, as if he'd taken her within himself, letting her rest her entire body for a moment on his backbone, her mind in his mind, her heart in the fire of his.
The fire of Brigan's heart was astounding. Fire understood, and almost could not believe, that the feeling he was sending her was love. — Kristin Cashore

Your way of life is sinful and wrong, he said fiercely.
Thus says a man who admits to worshipping a God who vilifies pleasure, relegates women to roles that are little more than servants and broodmares, though they are the backbone of your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear. — P.C. Cast

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism-how I hate them! — Albert Einstein

Tyler looked at Libby's set face across the table. He was scared to death, but he saw her faith in him. Where it came from, he couldn't guess, but her words hit hard. Did he have the courage, the guts to do this? On his own, no, probably not. But Libby, Libby, who had always been braver than him - she'd be here. She'd had the daring and the backbone to save him when he'd done everything possible to discourage her. — Alexis Harrington

Many a man has failed because he had his wishbone where his backbone should have been. — Ronald Reagan