Donald Miller Quotes

If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, “Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.”

I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.

And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.

To be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously.

And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people. That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.

And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it.

We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

If we knew how much God loved us and was for us, we’d talk to Him all day long.

People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.

Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to sleep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.

Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision.

Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.

Fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe;

it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life … the great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.

I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant.

I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has given you without holding them accountable.

We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace whimsy, that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.

When something happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it.

You can either get bitter, or get better.

Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.

It is always the simple things that change our lives.

And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things.

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

The human body essentially recreates itself every six months.

Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.

And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention.

We have to have positive male role models.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

If what you are doing is important, you will encounter resistance. If what you are doing isn't important it will be easy.

I don't know why it is, exactly, but the people with the healthiest self-esteem, are also the greatest at intimacy. I'm not talking about arrogant people. I'm talking about people who know they are both good and bad yet believe at the deepest level they are really good for people.

There are two types of men in this world--one is looking for a woman to make his life complete and the other is looking for a woman to join his complete life.

It is no coincidence that Jesus talks endlessly about love. Free love. Unconditional love.

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

I heard once that real love doesn't ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else's pack, lessen his load, and if it gets reciprocated, that's great, but that isn't what you did it for.

When I was in love there was somebody in the world who was more important than me, and that, given all that happened at the fall of man, is a miracle, like something God forgot to curse.

Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God's love will.

Lets choose to do something really difficult, something that saves lives, and let's do that thing with people we love.

Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.

We don't need as much as we have. Hardly any of us need as much money as we have. It's true what they say about the best things in life being free.

God made a whole beautiful earth and decided to put you in it, to experience all of this beauty. You can't do that watching television all the time.

Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

It’s interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It’s as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help.

Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.

Earthly love… is temporal and slight so that is has to be given again and again in order for us to feel any sense of security; but God’s love, God’s voice and presence, would instill our souls with such affirmation we would need nothing more and would cause us to love other people so much we would be willing to die for them.

I am early in my story, but I believe I will stretch out into eternity, and in heaven I will reflect upon these early days, these days when it seemed God was down a dirt road, walking toward me. Years ago He was a swinging speck in the distance; now He is close enough I can hear His singing. Soon I will see the lines on His face.

I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime.

My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

I think the best thing a person can do is to read through the Gospels in the Bible and really look at Jesus, because if a person does this, they will realize that the Jesus they learned about in Sunday school or the Jesus they hear jokes about or the skinny, Gandhi Jesus that exists in their imaginations isn't anything like the real Jesus at all.

Your life is a blank page. You write on it.

Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort isn't all that comfortable. And even if they secretly want for something better.

No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.

Of his new book, Don says: “It might be the greatest book ever written. I don’t think anybody is going to read a book again after they read my new one. I think God is proud of me. I am going to make a killing off this thing and I’m going to use the money to go to space.

All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It's like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.

When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.