Top 100 Donald Miller Quotes
#1. I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.
Donald Miller
#2. To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.
Donald Miller
#3. We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.
Donald Miller
#4. When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.
Donald Miller
#5. Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won't be meaningful.
Donald Miller
#6. I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God.
Donald Miller
#7. 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.
Donald Miller
#8. 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.
Donald Miller
#9. Of all the principles I'd learn about story, the idea that a character is what he does remains the hardest to actually live.
Donald Miller
#10. If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.
Donald Miller
#11. When we look back on our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out.
Donald Miller
#12. I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.
Donald Miller
#13. People who live great stories know failure isn't a judgment, it's an education.
Donald Miller
#14. I kept asking Him to say it again, but He wouldn't. I guess it's because I heard Him the first time, you know.
Donald Miller
#15. The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language ... those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.
Donald Miller
#16. Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells.
Donald Miller
#17. The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.
Donald Miller
#18. 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.
Donald Miller
#19. When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.
Donald Miller
#20. I posted the first three chapters and I had enough people say that chapter two was dragging that I cut it out just before the book went to press. And I'm glad I did. The book is a lot better without it.
Donald Miller
#21. Reality is like a fine wine," he said to me. "It will not appeal to children.
Donald Miller
#22. It's funny what happens to you when part of your heart gets born inside somebody else.
Donald Miller
#23. You're assuming that love is a feeling. It isn't. It can involve feelings, but often it doesn't. Love acts out of faith, which rarely involves feelings. Love is action; it's deciding something is true and living out of that belief.
Donald Miller
#24. And when you find love, or when you are mature enough to understand it, the feeling you get is gratitude.
Donald Miller
#25. Love can't be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other.
Donald Miller
#26. God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not.
Donald Miller
#27. It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.
Donald Miller
#28. Lets choose to do something really difficult, something that saves lives, and let's do that thing with people we love.
Donald Miller
#29. Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.
Donald Miller
#30. A half million books, all of them smelling like dust and ink, two terrible smells that blend mystically to make something beautiful.
Donald Miller
#31. If a piece of genius comes, it comes, and it if doesn't, it doesn't.
Donald Miller
#32. The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.
Donald Miller
#33. It is no coincidence that Jesus talks endlessly about love. Free love. Unconditional love.
Donald Miller
#34. They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.
Donald Miller
#35. 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.
Donald Miller
#36. I'm convinced every person has a longing that will never be fulfilled and it's our job to let it live and breathe and suffer within it as a way of developing our character.
Donald Miller
#37. What do markets do? They consolidate, they breakout, they extend, they overextend, they back and fill, they consolidate, and repeat the process. That's all you need to know about the markets.
Donald Miller
#38. I have a pastor friend who says the root of sin is the desire for control. I think there's some truth to that. And I'd add the root of control is fear.
Donald Miller
#39. And what is a story but the wanting for something difficult and the willingness to work for it?
Donald Miller
#40. If the time we spend trying to become somebody people will love isn't wasted because the most powerful, most attractive person we can be is who we already are,
Donald Miller
#41. Real love stories don't have dictators, they have participants.
Donald Miller
#42. 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.
Donald Miller
#43. 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.
Donald Miller
#44. You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back.
Donald Miller
#45. 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.
Donald Miller
#46. There are times in a man's life when he says things he will never be able take back. It's true words can have a physical impact on somebody. A person can concuss with their words. Words can snap as fast as a trap in the woods and leave a victim to writhe for weeks.
Donald Miller
#47. You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.
Donald Miller
#48. A beggar's kingdom is better than a proud man's delusion.
Donald Miller
#49. The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.
Donald Miller
#50. There is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like truth at all because it carries responsibility.
Donald Miller
#51. I read through the book of Matthew this evening. I was up all night. I couldn't stop reading so I read through Mark. This Jesus of yours is either a madman or the Son of God. Somewhere in the middle of Mark I realized He was the Son of God.
Donald Miller
#52. I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.
Donald Miller
#53. Every day you live is a page. Every year, a chapter. Your life, a book. What is it about?
Donald Miller
#54. 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.
Donald Miller
#55. 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."
Donald Miller
#56. 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.
Donald Miller
#57. Frankl went on to say it wasn't pleasure mankind was looking for, that men only sought pleasure when they couldn't find meaning. If a man has no sense of meaning, Frankl argued, he will numb himself with pleasure.
Donald Miller
#58. It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple.
Donald Miller
#59. I believed if word got out about grace, the whole church was going to turn into a brothel.
Donald Miller
#60. Betsy and I are going to try as hard as we can not to put the burden of that longing on each other," I said. "Instead, we will comfort each other in the longing and even love it for what it is, a promise that God will someday fulfill us.
Donald Miller
#61. I tend to connect most easily with two kinds of people, those who are creating something and those who are easily vulnerable. Both trees grow from the same root, I think, and that's the willingness to take risks.
Donald Miller
#62. THINGS JESUS NEVER SAID: You should come with me to church.
Donald Miller
#63. I don't have to watch the evening news to see that the world is bad, I only have to look at myself.
Donald Miller
#64. If we live behind a mask we can impress but we can't connect.
Donald Miller
#65. 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.
Donald Miller
#66. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper. But it is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful. The
Donald Miller
#67. Perhaps that's another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It's the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.
Donald Miller
#68. They never tell you when you get born a control freak it will cost you a healthy love life. But it's true. You can't control somebody and have intimacy with them at the same time. They may stay because they fear you, but true love casts out fear.
Donald Miller
#69. I only say this because a positive evolution happened in my life when I realized healthy relationships happen best between healthy people.
Donald Miller
#70. When I say I love you and you don't believe me, you're being a jerk. Basically what you're saying is I only love conditionally. You think you're being self-deprecating and funny, but you're really saying I'm not a good enough person to love you if you have a few flaws. It gets old.
Donald Miller
#71. 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.
Donald Miller
#72. I'd learned my default mode was to perform. Even in small groups I feel like I have to be "on." But when I'm alone my energy comes back. When I'm alone I don't have to perform for anybody.
Donald Miller
#73. place. I wondered whether a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally.
Donald Miller
#74. I knew he wouldn't die, because his life was like the roots of a tree that went miles into the soil and miles around its trunk and came up in my cousins, in their faces and their voices and their character. I didn't think you could kill a tree that big. Not even God could kill a tree that big.
Donald Miller
#75. It seems like, if you really knew the God who understands the physics of our existence, you would operate a little more cautiously, a little more compassionately, a little less like you are the center of the universe.
Donald Miller
#76. How disappointing would it be get to heaven and find out God created life to be enjoyed while all we did was worry?
Donald Miller
#77. 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.
Donald Miller
#78. The economy is turning around, so that's going to help a little bit.
Donald Miller
#79. Pain then, if one could have faith in something greater than himself, might be a path to experiencing a meaning beyond the false gratification of personal comfort.
Donald Miller
#80. Right, but you know, what would any of us lose by losing our possessions. Maybe we would gain something, like relationships, like the beauty of good friends, intimacy, you know what I mean, man? Like we wouldn't be losing anything if we lost our stuff, we'd be gaining everything.
Donald Miller
#81. Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.
Donald Miller
#82. God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he's going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy.
Donald Miller
#83. I used love like money, but love doesn't work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love it's enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.
Donald Miller
#84. I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.
Donald Miller
#85. I've learned there are givers and takers in this life. I've slowly let the takers go and I've had it for the better. God bless them, when they learn to play by the rules they are welcomed back, but my heart is worth protecting.
Donald Miller
#86. 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.
Donald Miller
#87. The very scary thing about religion, to me, is that people actually believe God is who they think He is.
Donald Miller
#88. People want to join a great story. If you want to lead, tell one with your life.
Donald Miller
#89. My faith teaches me that the path to join souls in love must of necessity involve a crucifixion, and I think there's a metaphor in there for marriage.
Donald Miller
#90. And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don't have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it's not natural to want to die.
Donald Miller
#91. The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck,
Donald Miller
#93. It's something you can actually control. With writing, it feels like it's given to you, and when the good stuff hits, it feels like it's coming from some other planet.And you're just channeling it.
Donald Miller
#94. This message God was communicating to mankind, this Gospel of Jesus, was a message to the heart as much as to the head, that the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the message could not be presented accurately outside of the emotions within which these truths were embedded.
Donald Miller
#95. 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 is not all that comfortable, even if they see clearly want for something better.
Donald Miller
#96. And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.
Donald Miller
#97. Sometimes the real bonding happens in conversations about nothing, Don," she said. "Sometimes being willing to talk about nothing shows how much we want to be with each other. And that's a powerful thing.
Donald Miller
#98. I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.
Donald Miller
#99. 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.
Donald Miller
#100. The early bird catches the worm. But I have never been one for worms. I am not sure what the late bird catches but I will feast with him today. Probably porridge.
Donald Miller
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