Top 100 Shauna Niequist Quotes
#1. But this is what I've learned the hard way: what people think about you means nothing in comparison to what you believe about yourself.
Shauna Niequist
#2. When things fall apart, the broken pieces allow all sorts of things to enter, and one of them is the presence of God.
Shauna Niequist
#3. Age, like numbers on a scale and letters on a report card, tells us very little of who we are. You decide every year exactly how young and how old you want to be.
Shauna Niequist
#4. Me. I see moments of heartbreak that led to honesty about myself I wouldn't have been able to get to any other way. I am thankful for what I learned, what I became, what God gave me and what God took away during that season.
Shauna Niequist
#5. When Life is Well say THANK YOU & CELEBRATE, and when life is Bitter say THANK YOU & GROW.
Shauna Niequist
#6. But our hearts are more elastic than we think, and the work of forgiveness and transformation and growth can do things you can't even imagine from where you're standing now.
Shauna Niequist
#7. To pray is to say that there is more than I can see, and more than I can do. There is more going on than meets the eye.
Shauna Niequist
#8. WHEN WE know what's essential in our lives, everything else is negotiable. What are some things you don't do? What things could you intentionally leave undone so that you can focus more deeply on the things you feel called to and passionate about?
Shauna Niequist
#9. Oh, the quiet moments alone with God I sacrificed in order to cross a few things off the to-do list I worshiped.
Shauna Niequist
#10. The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being.
Shauna Niequist
#11. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural.
Shauna Niequist
#12. I needed a piece of a story, something real and full of life and blood and breath and heartache, something that someone had lived through, a piece of wisdom earned the hard way. That's why telling our stories is so important.
Shauna Niequist
#13. Christians have made too much out of work in the same way that Americans have begun engaging in yoga competitions - twisted-up versions of a purer thing. Christians want to make a difference. So we do, and we do, and we do, and then we find ourselves exhausted. In
Shauna Niequist
#14. People called me tough. And capable. And they said I was someone they could count on. Those are all nice things. Kind of. But they're not the same as loving, or kind, or joyful. I was not those things. I
Shauna Niequist
#15. The problem is that the worldview I've chosen has melted like butter. I had a plan, and the plan is gone.
Shauna Niequist
#16. Even though my fear was detonating over and over like bombs dropping, the fragile and fractured wings of my heart dared to beat as well, and alongside all that fear and all that gratitude, I felt the first precious rush of hope.
Shauna Niequist
#17. You want me to say that when you grow, finally, all the changes will stop, but they don't. There will be another one, another opportunity to grow, to shed your skin, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, to break out of your cocoon like a perfect new butterfly.
Shauna Niequist
#18. Stop. Right now. Remake your life from the inside out.
Shauna Niequist
#19. There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.
Shauna Niequist
#20. We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.
Shauna Niequist
#21. In my experience, you can never go wrong with flowers and food, even when someone insists that there's nothing at all you can do.
Shauna Niequist
#22. Friendship is an opportunity to act on God's behalf in the lives of the people that we're close to, reminding each other who God is.
Shauna Niequist
#23. Gossip is so dangerous, because it makes you feel like you told the truth. And you did. Just not to the person involved. It scratches that itch, that impulse to tell the truth, but it has no power to transform, and it destroys trust. When
Shauna Niequist
#24. We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day.
Shauna Niequist
#25. This is hospitality at its core. This is the beat of my heart: to experience grace and nourishment, and to offer it, one in each hand, to every person I meet - grace and nourishment. You can rest. You don't have to starve.
Shauna Niequist
#26. Life sneaks up on us every once in a while and gives us something we didn't ever know we wanted, and lights within us a love we didn't even know existed.
Shauna Niequist
#27. IT'S EASY to long for nothing but good news and carefree days, but a full life includes the broken and dark and difficult parts, too. Thank God for walking with you in the seasons of heartbreak.
Shauna Niequist
#28. [Present over perfect is] about rejecting the myth that every day is a new opportunity to prove our worth, and about the truth that our worth is inherent, given by God, not earned by our hustling.
Shauna Niequist
#29. the difference between restaurant cooking and home cooking - and often, too, the difference between great flavor and tasteless food - is two things: more heat and more seasoning. His constant refrain as he made his way around the kitchen: "More heat. More salt. More butter.
Shauna Niequist
#30. The general world population will survive without one more stage production and one more gallery showing. This is the thing, though: you might not. We create because we were made to create, having been made in the image of God, whose first role was Creator.
Shauna Niequist
#31. It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.
Shauna Niequist
#32. we're constantly looking for ways to help each other's lives get lighter, easier to carry, closer to the heart of what we love, less clogged with expectations and unnecessary tasks.
Shauna Niequist
#33. But it isn't about perfection, and it isn't about performance. You'll miss the richest moments in life - the sacred moments when we feel God's grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love - if you're too scared or too ashamed to open the door.
Shauna Niequist
#34. Sometimes the darkest parts of us can be our teachers in ways that our sweeter qualities never could.
Shauna Niequist
#35. We don't learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you.
Shauna Niequist
#36. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.
Shauna Niequist
#37. Every year, you will trade a little of your perfect skin and your ability to look great without exercising for wisdom and peace and groundedness, and every year the trade will be worth it. I promise.
Shauna Niequist
#38. I need grace and truth-telling and camaraderie from other moms. I need us to tell the truth about how hard it is, and I need us to help each other, instead of hiding behind the pretense and pressure of perfection.
Shauna Niequist
#39. you just have to take one step, and that when you do, the next one will appear.
Shauna Niequist
#40. When Life is Well say THANK YOU & CELEBRATE, and when life is Bitter say THANK YOU & GROW.
Shauna Niequist
#41. when you stay with something instead of walking away, it builds something new inside of you, something solid and weighty, something durable. But you do have to wait for it. You have to earn it the hard way.
Shauna Niequist
#42. And that's the core of prayer: admitting that just maybe, there's something going on that we can't see. So when I'm afraid, I pray, and I ask for God's help, that I will be able to see something I wasn't able to see before, or at least trust him to do the seeing.
Shauna Niequist
#43. Great art says the things we wished someone would say out loud, the things we wish we could say out loud.
Shauna Niequist
#44. your world will never be small if you love to read, because you can be anyone, anywhere, at any period in history. My
Shauna Niequist
#45. After all these years, the heaviest thing isn't the number on the scale but the weight of the shame I've carried all these years
too big, too big, too big.
Shauna Niequist
#46. Sometimes the happiest ending isn't the one you keep longing for, but something you absolutely cannot see from where you are.
Shauna Niequist
#47. The world is alive, blinking and clicking, winking at us slyly, inviting us to get up and dance to the music that's been playing since the beginning of time, if you bend all the way down and put your ear to the ground to listen for it.
Shauna Niequist
#49. When we, any of us who have been transformed by Christ, tell our own stories, we're telling the story of who God is.
Shauna Niequist
#50. Life with God at its core is about giving your life up to something bigger and more powerful. It's about saying at every turn that God knows better than we know, and that his Spirit will lead us in ways that we couldn't have predicted. I have known that, but I haven't really lived that.
Shauna Niequist
#51. I've learned that in many cases, change is not a function of life's cruelty but instead a function of God's graciousness.
Shauna Niequist
#52. We actually want to hear the whole story. We want to understand who you are because of that season. I'd never bring that season up, but it's part of our history, and it meant something to me that they wanted to understand it.
Shauna Niequist
#53. Now that I am a mother, I understand what Mother's Day is about: it's about looking through our lives and recognizing the act of mothering everywhere we see it, and more than that, recognizing that when any of us mother
when we listen, nuture, nourish, protect
we're doing sacred work.
Shauna Niequist
#54. That always used to make you happy don't do the trick anymore, because they can't break through the sadness and fear that are covering over everything in your life.
Shauna Niequist
#55. When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.
Shauna Niequist
#56. Life is painful, and we carry with us so much disappointment and heartbreak. But I'm fighting to save some space inside me where I can create hope.
Shauna Niequist
#57. No one lives out an exciting calling without just plunging forward at some point, full of fear and uncertainty.
Shauna Niequist
#58. When you offer peace instead of division, when you offer faith instead of fear, when you offer someone a place at your table instead of keeping them out because they're different or messy or wrong somehow, you represent the heart of Christ.
Shauna Niequist
#59. Life hands us opportunities at every turn to get over ourselves, to get outside ourselves, to wake up from our own bad dreams and realize that really lovely things are happening all the time.
Shauna Niequist
#60. Because there really is nothing like good friends, like the sounds of their laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments.
Shauna Niequist
#61. TRAVEL BREATHES new life into our sense of what is possible, and allows us to see our lives from a new perspective. When was the last time a new location opened up something new in you?
Shauna Niequist
#62. OPPORTUNITIES TO build friendship and community don't always come at the most convenient times, but we have to grab them when we get the chance.
Shauna Niequist
#63. Each of us has been created by a holy God with love, on purpose and for a purpose. But so many of us feel afraid or unprepared. This is the secret, though: No one is prepared enough. No one is perfectly ready.
Shauna Niequist
#64. It has come to me with a fight. It has come to me the hard way, through tears and fog and fear and chaos, and now has landed in the palm of my hand like a firefly. There now, I have had my vision.
Shauna Niequist
#65. When I write, I can see things that I can't otherwise see, and I feel things that I can't otherwise feel.
Shauna Niequist
#66. Your pain doesn't define you. Your failures don't define you. Your createdness defines you. Christ in his goodness defines you".
Shauna Niequist
#67. Just because you have the capacity to do something doesn't mean you have to do it. Management, organization, speaking and traveling: you must ask not only what fruit they bring to the world, but what fruit they yield on the inside of your life and your heart. I
Shauna Niequist
#68. The world will tell you how to live, if you let it. Don't let it. Take up your space. Raise your voice. Sing your song. This is your chance to make or remake a life that thrills you.
Shauna Niequist
#69. everything is interim. Every season that I thought was stable and would be just how it was for a long time ended up being a preparation or a path to the next thing. When you decide to be on this journey with God, everything is interim.
Shauna Niequist
#70. Sometimes it helps to get outside our problems and stick our fingers into someone else's problems for a while.
Shauna Niequist
#71. I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.
Shauna Niequist
#72. WE LIVE out the love of God when we care for those he brings into our lives. Have you ever been surprised by who you came to love, because they became yours in some way?
Shauna Niequist
#73. I don't make our bed in the morning, standing firm on the adolescent belief that there's no sense in doing something you're just going to undo at the end of the day.
Shauna Niequist
#74. Good friendships are like breakfast. You think you're too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired.
Shauna Niequist
#75. Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences.
Shauna Niequist
#76. I'm learning that both body and soul require more tenderness and attentiveness than I had imagined.
Shauna Niequist
#77. I'm a reader and a storyteller, and God chose literature and story and poetry as the languages of my spiritual text. To me, the Bible is a manifesto, a guide, a love letter, a story.
Shauna Niequist
#78. In my best moments, when I calm down and listen closely, God says, I didn't ask you to become new and improved today. That wasn't the goal. You were broken down and strange yesterday, and you still are today, and the only one freaked out about it is you.
Shauna Niequist
#79. The natural world is so breathtakingly beautiful. People are so weird and awesome and loving and life-giving. Why, then, did I try so hard for so long to get away without feeling or living deeply?
Shauna Niequist
#80. We decide where the time goes. There's so much freedom in that, and so much responsibility.
Shauna Niequist
#81. The heart of hospitality is about creating space for someone to feel seen and heard and loved. It's about declaring your table a safe zone, a place of warmth and nourishment.
Shauna Niequist
#82. I thought the doing and the busyness would keep me safe. They keep me numb. Which is not the same as safe, which isn't even the greatest thing to aspire to. If
Shauna Niequist
#83. Brave doesn't always involve grand gestures, sometimes brave looks like staying when you want to leave, telling the truth when all you want to do is change the subject... sometimes brave looks like boring, and thats totally, absolutely, okay.
Shauna Niequist
#84. Food is a language of care, the thing we do when traditional language fails us, when we don't know what to say, when there are no words to say.
Shauna Niequist
#85. This is actually my life, and it doesn't matter a bit if it would be lovely for someone else to live. What does matter: does it feel congruent with how God made me and called me?
Shauna Niequist
#86. So this is the dance, it seems to me: to be the kind of host who honors the needs of the people who gather around his or her table, and to be the kind of guest who comes to the table to learn, not to demand.
Shauna Niequist
#87. Food matters because it's one of the things that forces us to live in this world
this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world
no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness.
Shauna Niequist
#88. Or it can be the reason we use to justify our anger and the sharp tones in our voices for the rest of our lives.
Shauna Niequist
#89. Let's be courageous in these days. Let's choose love and rest and grace. Let's use our minutes and hours to create memories with the people we love instead of dragging them on one more errand or shushing them while we accomplish one more seemingly necessary thing.
Shauna Niequist
#90. When I've practiced acceptance, when I've floated instead of fought, when I've rested, even for a moment, on the surface instead of wrestling the water itself. And those moments are like heaven.
Shauna Niequist
#91. It's easy to be liked by strangers. It's very hard to be loved and connected to the people in your home when you're always bringing them your most exhausted self and resenting the fact that the scraps you're giving them aren't cutting it.
Shauna Niequist
#92. My Mom and Dad and brother have grown through the years into my closest friends, the people who tell me the most searing truth, who give me soft places to rest and present to me a bright future when the only one I can see from my vantage point is dim and breaking before my eyes.
Shauna Niequist
#93. When you're (traveling) with someone else, you share each discovery, but when you are alone, you have to carry each experience with you like a secret, something you have to write on your heart, because there's no other way to preserve it.
Shauna Niequist
#94. Sometimes we have to leave home in order to find out what we left there, and why it matters so much.
Shauna Niequist
#95. Marriage isn't a business, co-owned and managed. It's a love story. The most important things we can give our marriage are time and romance, kissing and laughing. Laundry can wait, but a love story needs to be written a little bit every day. WHEN
Shauna Niequist
#96. Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul.
Shauna Niequist
#97. Some of the most life-shaping decisions you make in this season will be about walking away from good-enough, in search of can't-live-without.
Shauna Niequist
#98. What powers our work when it's no longer about addiction to achievement?
Shauna Niequist
#99. You can make your point all day long, and you can even be right about your point, but if you stop listening, if you stop really hearing and seeing that other person, something fundamental will be lost.
Shauna Niequist
#100. You can use whatever term you want: besetting sin, shadow side, strength and weakness. The very thing that makes you you, that makes you great, that makes you different from everyone else is also the thing that, unchecked, will ruin you. For me, it's lust for life. It's energy, curiosity, hunger.
Shauna Niequist
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