Quotes from Donald Miller

I don't know if there's a healthier way for two people to stay in love than to stop using each other to resolve their unfulfilled longings and, instead, start holding each other closely as they experience them.

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

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 live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

I am willing to sound dumb. I am willing to be wrong. I am willing to be passionate about something that isn't perceived as cool. I am willing to express a theory. I am willing to admit I'm afraid. I'm willing to contradict something I've said before. I'm willing to have a knee-jerk reaction, even a wrong one. I'm willing to apologize. I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human.

There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.

Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can't accept their imperfections can't accept grace either.

It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don't have integrity, life becomes exhausting.

Here are two things I found taking the long road, though: Applause is a quick fix. And love is an acquired taste.

Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.

I think life is staggering and we're just too used to it.

I am human because God made me. I experience suffering and temptation because mankind chose to follow Satan. God is reaching out to me to rescue me. I am learning to trust Him, learning to live by His precepts that I might be preserved.

Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away.

It's a beautiful moment when somebody wakes up to this reality, when they realize God created them so other people could enjoy them, not just endure them.

Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

The thing about new things is you feel new when you buy them, you feel as though you are somebody different because you own something different. We are our possessions, you know. There are people who get addicted to buying new stuff. Things. Piles and piles of things. But the new things become old things so quickly. We need new things to replace the old things.

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.

If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness. He changes out of character with the passion of his love.

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.

Remarkably, the most common regret of the dying was this: they wish they'd had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them.

I used to get really ticked about preachers who talked too much about grace, because they tempted me to not be disciplined. I figured what people needed was a kick in the butt, and if I failed at godliness it was because those around me weren't trying hard enough.

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.

the times we worked harder to make the day stand out. our story demanded that we change and so we did.

It's all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn't conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it's just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.