Top 100 Brennan Manning Quotes
#1. God loves us as we are ... not as we ought to be. because we are never going to be as we ought to be.
Brennan Manning
Brennan Manning
#2. We may not be the kind of people we want to be, we may be a long way from our goals, we may have more failures than achievements, we may not be wealthy or powerful or spiritual, we may not even be happy, but we are nonetheless accepted by God, held in his hands.
Brennan Manning
#3. Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try and find something or someone that it cannot cover. Grace is enough.
Brennan Manning
#4. Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works - but our lives refute our faith.
Brennan Manning
#5. We are enveloped in peace, whether or not we feel ourselves to be at peace. By that I mean the peace that passes understanding is not a subjective sensation of peace; if we are in Christ, we are in peace even when we feel no peace.
Brennan Manning
#6. Trust is that rare and priceless treasure that wins us the affection of our heavenly Father.
Brennan Manning
#7. Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.
Brennan Manning
#8. Even if we come back because we couldn't make it on our own, God will welcome us. He will seek no explanations about our sudden appearance. He is glad we are there
Brennan Manning
#9. Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.
Brennan Manning
#10. The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.
Brennan Manning
#11. God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be.
Brennan Manning
#12. We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.
Brennan Manning
#13. The way you are with others every day, regardless of their status, is the true test of faith.
Brennan Manning
#14. As Emile Leger said when he left his mansion in Montreal to go live in a leper colony in Africa, The time for talking is over.
Brennan Manning
#15. Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any call), everybody has a vocation to be a person to be fully and deeply human in Christ Jesus.
Brennan Manning
#16. Authentic Christianity should lead to maturity, personality, and reality. It should fashion whole men and women living lives of love and communion
Brennan Manning
#17. The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can't save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.
Brennan Manning
#18. The antithesis of giving thanks is grumbling. The grumblers live in a state of self-induced stress.
Brennan Manning
#19. The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency ... God's sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we sinned and failed.
Brennan Manning
#20. The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins, including the sins of the flesh; that He is comfortable with sinners who remember how to show compassion; but that He cannot and will not have a relationship with pretenders in the Spirit.
Brennan Manning
#21. The beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus: the essential tenderness of His heart, His way of looking at the world, His mode of relating to you and me. 'If you really want to understand a man, don't just listen to what he says, but watch what he does.
Brennan Manning
#22. Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone ...
Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness.
Brennan Manning
#23. To be alive is to
be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.
Brennan Manning
#24. On one level, a roomful of men is always a dangerous thing. Competition is usually in the air, so the potential for violence is always nearby.
Brennan Manning
#25. Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father's active goodness and unrestricted love.
Brennan Manning
#26. Accepting the reality of our sinfulness means accepting our authentic self. Judas could not face his shadow; Peter could. The latter befriended the impostor within; the former raged against him.
Brennan Manning
#27. It is better to live naked in truth than clothed in fantasy.
Brennan Manning
#28. Quit keeping score altogether and surrender yourself with all your sinfulness to God who sees neither the score nor the scorekeeper but only his child redeemed by Christ.
Brennan Manning
#30. Jesus comes for sinners, for those outcast ... and those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams.
Brennan Manning
#31. The life of Jesus suggests that to be like Abba is to show compassion.
Donald Gray expresses this: Jesus reveals in an exceptionally human life what it is to live a divine life, a compassionate life.
Brennan Manning
#32. Ruthless trust ultimately comes down to this: faith in the person of Jesus and hope in his promise.
Brennan Manning
#33. A ragamuffin knows he's only a beggar at the door of God's mercy.
Brennan Manning
#35. The ancient spiritual tradition is that God gives himself fully to us in silence and solitude.
Brennan Manning
#36. In a revealed religion, silence with God has a value in itself and for its own sake, just because God is God. Failure to recognize the value of mere being with God, as the beloved, without doing anything, is to gouge the heart out of Christianity."10 Silent solitude makes true speech possible
Brennan Manning
#37. When belonging to an elite group eclipses the love of God, when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead. When God gets relegated to second place behind any bauble or trinket, I have swapped the pearl of great price for painted fragments of glass.
Brennan Manning
#38. You will trust God to the degree you know you are loved by Him.
Brennan Manning
#39. Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat out denial of the gospel of grace.
Brennan Manning
#40. Childlike in faith means the daily acknowledgment of utter dependence and that I owe my life and being to another.
Brennan Manning
#41. The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.
Brennan Manning
#42. Being the beloved is our identity, the core of our existence. It is not merely a lofty thought, an inspiring idea, or one name among many. It is the name by which God knows us and the way He relates to us
Brennan Manning
#43. No one, it seems to me, who has fully grasped the Crucifixion can ever again take seriously any expression or instrument of worldly power, however venerable, glittering, or seemingly formidable. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
Brennan Manning
#44. A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.
Brennan Manning
#45. When a man or woman is truly honest, it is virtually impossible to insult them personally.
Brennan Manning
#46. We miss Jesus' point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others.
Brennan Manning
#47. Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded.
Brennan Manning
#48. By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived.
Brennan Manning
#49. He progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones.
Brennan Manning
#50. Christianity doesn't deny the reality of suffering and evil ... Our hope ... is not based on the idea that we are going to be free of pain and suffering. Rather, it is based on the conviction that we will triumph over suffering.
Brennan Manning
#51. If we are going to keep on growing, we must keep on risking failure throughout our lives. When
Brennan Manning
#52. We can only sense ourselves and our world valued and cherished by God when we feel valued and cherished by others '.
Brennan Manning
#53. One of the the loveliest lines I have ever read comes from Brother Roger, the Prior of the Protestant monks of Taize, France: 'Assured of your salvation by the unique grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.' It is still difficult for me to read these words without tears filling my eyes. It is wonderful.
Brennan Manning
#54. When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God's gift of grace.
Brennan Manning
#55. The first step in faith is to stop thinking about God at the time of prayer.-
Brennan Manning
#56. For several centuries, the Celtic church of Ireland was spared the Greek dualism of matter and spirit. They regarded the world with the clear vision of faith. When a young Celtic monk saw his cat catch a salmon swimming in shallow water, he cried, The power of the Lord is in the paw of the cat!
Brennan Manning
#57. Faith means believing that I am Yours and You are mine, that I am who You say I am: Your beloved, fearfully and wonderfully accepted.
Brennan Manning
#58. How glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved!
Brennan Manning
#59. The gospel will persuade no one unless it has so convicted us that we are transformed by it.
Brennan Manning
#60. The most important thing that ever happens in prayer is letting ourselves be loved by God. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10).
Brennan Manning
#61. Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games or pop psychology. IT IS AN ACT OF FAITH in the God of grace.
Brennan Manning
#62. There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are.
Brennan Manning
#63. God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am. Because of this I don't need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him. I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness.
Brennan Manning
#64. Biblically, tenderness is what follows when someone reveals to you your own inner beauty, when you discover your belovedness, when you experience that you are deeply and sincerely liked by someone.
Brennan Manning
#65. We unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves ... But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves
unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.
Brennan Manning
#66. One thing we do know: We don't comprehend the love of Jesus Christ.
Brennan Manning
#67. Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don't have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.
Brennan Manning
#68. We are made for God, and nothing less will ever satisfy us
Brennan Manning
#69. Troubadours have always been more important and influential than theologians and bishops
Brennan Manning
#70. Be daring enough to be different,
humble enough to make mistakes,
wild enough to be burnt in the fire of love,
real enough to make others see how phony you are.
Brennan Manning
#71. What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation,
God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.
Brennan Manning
#72. Don't try to understand it. You won't succeed. Don't try to see it. You can't. Try to live it, and you will be living out of the center.
Brennan Manning
#73. Christianity is not an ethical code. It is a love affair, a Spirit-filled way of living aimed at making us professional lovers of God and people.
Brennan Manning
#74. One of my realizations in such an earthy atmosphere was that many of the burning theological issues in the church were neither burning nor theological.
Brennan Manning
#75. Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchanted by God's power. We stutter and stammer about God's holiness. We tremble before God's majesty ...
and yet, we grow squeamish and skittish before God's love.
Brennan Manning
#76. The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad.2
Brennan Manning
#77. The defense mechanisms of The Imposter are: sarcasm, name-dropping, self-righteousness, the need to impress others and the need for others' approval.
Manning Brennan
#78. I you think you've done it, then you're wrong. Because you're not finished until you have achieved everything that you never thought you could.
Brennan Manning
#79. According to Viktor Frankl, a person finds identity only to the extent that "he commits himself to something beyond himself, to a cause greater than himself."4 The meaning of our lives emerges in the surrender of ourselves to an adventure of becoming who we are not yet.
Brennan Manning
#80. It was C. S. Lewis who said, "We need to be reminded more than instructed.
Brennan Manning
#81. Without the sharing of personal experience, prophetic preaching is impossible.
Brennan Manning
#82. To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means.
Brennan Manning
#83. If asked whether I am finally letting God love me, just as I am, I would answer, 'No, but I'm trying.
Brennan Manning
#84. Christianity happens when men and women accept with unwavering trust that their sins have been not only forgiven, but forgotten, washed away in the blood of the Lamb. Thus, my friend archbishop Joe Reia says, A sad Christian is a phony Christian, and a guilty Christian is no Christian at all.
Brennan Manning
#85. Larry Hein, who wrote the blessing: May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit
Brennan Manning
#86. For Foucauld and the Little Brothers, life in the desert was not a flight from the world but rather a school of love and prayer to learn to enter more deeply into humanity. Their goal was to shout the gospel not so much with their mouths as with their lives.
Brennan Manning
#88. ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE the overriding issue for the ragamuffin rabble is the person of Jesus Christ.
Brennan Manning
#89. Do you honestly believe God likes you, not just loves you because theologically God has to love you?
Brennan Manning
#90. The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.'
'What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either.
Brennan Manning
#91. May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is the Father, Son and Spirit.
Brennan Manning
#92. My trust in God flows out of the experience of his loving me, day in and day out, whether the day is stormy or fair, whether I'm sick or in good health, whether I'm in a state of grace or disgrace. He comes to me where I live and loves me as I am.
Brennan Manning
#93. I am convinced that without a gutlevel experience of our profound spiritual emptiness, it is not possible to encounter the living God.
Brennan Manning
#94. Only reckless confidence in a Source greater than ourselves can empower us to forgive the woulds inflicted by others.
Brennan Manning
#95. Words without poetry lack passion; words without passion lack persuasion; words without persuasion lack power.
Brennan Manning
#96. Secondly, if we continue to view ourselves as moral lepers and spiritual failures, if our lives are shadowed by low self-esteem, shame, remorse, unhealthy guilt, and self-hatred, we reject the teaching of Jesus and cling to our negative self-image. In
Brennan Manning
#97. Choose a single, sacred word or phrase that captures something of the flavor of your intimate relationship with God. A word such as Jesus, Abba, Peace, God or a phrase such as "Abba, I belong to you." ... Without moving your lips, repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often.
Brennan Manning
#98. Hope knows that if great trials are avoided great deeds remain undone and the possibility of growth into greatness of soul is aborted.
Brennan Manning
#99. The litmus test of our love for God is our love of neighbor.
Brennan Manning
#100. In philosophy, the opposite of truth is error; in Scripture, the opposite of truth is a lie.
Brennan Manning
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
