Donald Miller Quotations

Every human being is searching for a deep sense of meaning, and yet we're all chasing success. We've confused one for the other.

Christians might say that you can't live a more meaningful life without Jesus. Well, that's absolutely not true. You can. You can enjoy a sunrise whether you know Jesus or not.

I think that's the true litmus test for someone who has become closer to Jesus: their heart is more loving, accepting, childlike, less believing that they have all the answers and more believing in Him.

One of the things I associate with God is a sunrise. How many sunrises have you missed over the years, and God created that?

I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.

Sunday morning church service is not an enormous priority; spending time with other believers is.

It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple.

I started 'Storyline' after I'd accomplished all my goals and still wasn't happy. I'd become a 'New York Times' bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.

Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It's like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.

I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.

One of the things I love about our source text as Christians, the Bible, is that it teaches us not to avoid conflict. And it teaches us that before the fall of man, in Paradise, there was conflict. God wants conflict to be a part of your life.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

People are lonely. They want company and your book can provide them company and a little bit of hope. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Without a positive male role model in your life, it is extremely difficult to become a man who benefits his family and benefits society.

Most of us are waiting. We're waiting for something interesting to happen. And I think we're going to wait forever if we don't do something more interesting with our lives.

The most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.

I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, 'This is my idea and here's all the reasons that it's right.' It doesn't make for very compelling reading.

I used to write when I was in the mood or felt inspired. Anymore, I write whether I feel inspired or not. It's a discipline. So that's definitely different. It's part of maturing as a person and as a professional.

Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.

There's no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.

We don't naturally want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to give the responsibility to someone else. We blame them when our lives aren't good.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

I'm not a pastor; I've never been on staff at a church.

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

I think it's very hard for us, for Christians, to understand that it's okay to read a book, for instance, on how to manage your time. There's nothing wrong with that.

I have a real problem with (solely funding the program) unless the townships kick in some money to help fund it,

Mexicans are educating themselves and becoming serious consumers of wine, and sommeliers in Mexico City are starting to take notice.

People want to join a great story. If you want to lead, tell one with your life.

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

The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is 'Do not fear.' It's in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn't let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But 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.

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.

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

Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

Let's show up to life. Let's prove how beautiful it can really be. Let's face the conflict, redeem it, conquer it, and allow it to mold our character. Let's participate in what God is doing in the world.

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

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.”

The times in my life when I have been most happy haven't been the times when I have had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I've been in love or in community or right with people.

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.

What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.

The more I try to impress people, the more I separate myself from them. Vulnerability attracts love.

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.

I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me

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.

What we really need is somebody who loves us so much we don’t worry about death, or about [anything for that matter]… We need this; we need this so we can love other people purely and not for selfish gain, we need this so we can see everybody as equals, we need this so our relationships can be sincere, we need this so we can stop kicking ourselves around, we need this so we can lose all self-awareness and find ourselves for the first time, not by realizing some dream, but by being told who we are by the only Being who has the authority to know, by that I mean the Creator.

There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.

...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.

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.

How disappointing would it be get to heaven and find out God created life to be enjoyed while all we did was worry?

And when you find love, or when you are mature enough to understand it, the feeling you get is gratitude.

Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself...

Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's, with feet like trees and a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation.

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

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.

It's not what people do that scares me. It's what they hide. It's the secrets that keep us from bonding and create distrust. If we were more willing to accept each other's depravity we'd be more united, we'd be more honest. If you hide two things from me, I'll assume you're hiding a million. And I'll keep you at a distance. I'm not afraid of the evil in you. It's in me too.

Great stories move through fear.

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

I think our society puts too much pressure on romantic love, and that is why so many romances fail. Romance can't possibly carry all that we want it to.

People who live great stories know failure isn’t a judgment, it’s an education.

It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.

...I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.

I loved the fact that it wasn't my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God's, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.

I believe the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. I was into habit.

I want to start replacing my “fix” response with an “enjoy” response and just let people be themselves.

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.

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

We don't think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to your imperfections.

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.

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.

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.

When something happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or get better.

There's a genius part of you that wants to create. That part of you wants to talk to God. Get out of the way.

I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.

And there is something profoundly humbling about knowing God. I’m not talking about the trinket God or the genie-in-a-lamp God. I mean the God who invented the tree in my front yard, the beauty of my sweetheart, the taste of a blueberry, the violence of a river at flood. There are a lot of religious trends that would have us controlling God, telling us that if we do this that and the other, God will jump through our hoops like a monkey. But this other God, this real God, is awesome and strong, all-encompassing and passionate, and for reasons I will never understand, he wants to father us.

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

All the trees are losing their leaves, and not one of them is worried.

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.

In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life.

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

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

...she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, sit down with myself and explain that things were going to be okay, that everybody loses ground sometimes and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the way life works. This is hard to understand in the moment. You get to thinking about the girl who rejected you, the job you got fired from, the test you failed, and you lose sight of the big picture — the fact that life has a beautiful way of remaking itself every few weeks.

If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.

I think writers would do better to consider that idea [to write to yourself], because you know yourself really well, and you never know your demographic fully. You only get into trouble if you try to please somebody you don't really understand.

She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.

I'm the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world, so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.

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.

When I started studying the issue and issues related to fatherlessness, I realized I had all of them. Fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, poor work ethic, just stuff that you don't have when you don't have a man in your life to look you in the eye and say, "You're good," or "Good job."

I'm just trying to make the point that the story we're telling ourselves is often very different from the story we're telling the people around us.