91+ Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes On Marriage, God And Bible

Barbara Brown Taylor is an American priest, author, and professor. She is an Episcopal priest and professor of religion at Piedmont College in Georgia. Taylor is known for her best-selling books and her inspiring sermons, which have been featured on the PBS show Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Barbara Brown Taylor on love, marriage, leadership.

Top 10 Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes

1. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
2. Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
3. We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.
4. Our waiting is not nothing. It is something -- a very big something -- because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.
5. I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.
6. That's enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.
7. I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.
8. God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost.
9. The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.
10. Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.

Barbara Brown Taylor Short Quotes

• The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
• Humanity can be pretty stinky.
• I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
• Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
• I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
• The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
• Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
• Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
• I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
• Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes About Love

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. — Barbara Brown Taylor

It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don't even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child. — Barbara Brown Taylor

As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms. The divine presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that's entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes About God

Most of us like thinking we are God's only children...At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was...it wasn't until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness. — Barbara Brown Taylor

When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it's losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my value was to God. I lost all of that at least. — Barbara Brown Taylor

We're children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We're also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst. — Barbara Brown Taylor

To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes About Life

There comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address — Barbara Brown Taylor

The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity. — Barbara Brown Taylor

You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before. — Barbara Brown Taylor

To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light. — Barbara Brown Taylor

When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it. — Barbara Brown Taylor

In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life — Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor Famous Quotes And Sayings

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices.... Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end. — Barbara Brown Taylor

It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor. Liking to be alone can be interpreted as a judgment on other people's company. Liking to be quiet can be construed as aloofness. There is so much emphasis on community in most congregations that anyone who does not participate risks being labeled a loner. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I went to the little church in the country after ten years in the city. And part of my dream was to sit on people's front porches with glasses of iced tea, and all that happened. I was able to send birthday cards to everyone in the parish and able to know everyone who was there on Sunday by name. And that was what I'd been looking for. — Barbara Brown Taylor

It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own. — Barbara Brown Taylor

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well. — Barbara Brown Taylor

When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, 'Here, I guess, since this is where I am.' — Barbara Brown Taylor

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I don't miss the ministry, because I'm completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I've relaxed enormously since then. I'm the one who gets to say that, and not someone else. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian." — Barbara Brown Taylor

The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes...swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God's best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am. — Barbara Brown Taylor

You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship. — Barbara Brown Taylor

If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble. — Barbara Brown Taylor

When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner. — Barbara Brown Taylor

There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Because I'm a "strong person," the symptoms hit me by surprise. It was, as I write in the book, stinging in my eyes after Sunday that I thought was an allergy, until one day I sat in the car and decided to just let my eyes tear up so that whatever was in them would come out, and what came out were tears that wouldn't stop. It was literally a physical reaction that was my first indication there was anything wrong. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God's name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message. — Barbara Brown Taylor

With all the conceptual truths in the universe at His disposal [Jesus] did not give them something to think about together when He was gone. Instead, He gave them concrete things to do - specific ways of being together in their bodies - that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when He was no longer around to teach them Himself ... "Do this" He said - not believe this but do this - "in remembrance of me. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to find out what it was and obey. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I'd left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I'd left. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn't felt comfortable or responsible doing that before. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Contrary to popular opinion, Christians are not nice polite people who never get angry with one another. Those are not the virtues of God's people. Our virtues are truth-telling, kindness, forgiveness and yes, even anger-as long as it is the anger that is part of true love-through which we move closer to one another and to the God who has shown us how it is done. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I'll capitalize both of those R's, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it's what is most real. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing. — Barbara Brown Taylor

For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I found myself in a maze where I'd taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn't doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God. — Barbara Brown Taylor

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Life Lessons by Barbara Brown Taylor

1. Barbara Brown Taylor teaches us to have faith in ourselves and to trust in our own inner wisdom. She encourages us to be open to the beauty of the world around us and to find joy in the simple moments of life.
2. She reminds us that it is important to take time for ourselves and to be mindful of our own well-being. She encourages us to be compassionate and to recognize the interconnectedness of all life.
3. Finally, she encourages us to be open to the mystery of the world and to embrace the unknown with a sense of wonder and curiosity.