Donald Miller Quotes

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

We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace whimsy, that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.

It is worthy of note that the Chinese and Japanese characters for money and gold are the same.

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.

No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

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

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.

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

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.

The thing I loved about her was that I never felt like she was selling anything. She would talk to God as if she knew Him, as if she had talked to Him on the phone that day. She was never ashamed which is the thing with some Christians I had encountered.

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.

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.

God doesn't give us crying, pooping children because he wants to advance our careers.

I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. 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.

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

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 think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the thing we need.

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

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.

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.

Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe.

Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won't be meaningful.

All relationships are living and alive and moving and becoming something.

Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.

I think writers can get a little melodramatic sometimes about their work, and it helps me not to do that, to just say, "Well, this is how I make a living, and I need to become a very good craftsman."

Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all.

It blew my mind that what I was thinking was actually applicable to people's lives, and it certainly revolutionized family.

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.

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

You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.

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.

I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city........I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing.

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you're going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

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.

And through a dark night of the soul, I came to realize that salvation happens through a mysterious, indefinable, relational interaction with Jesus in which we become one with Him. I realized Christian conversion worked more like falling in love than understanding a series of concepts of ideas. This is not to say there are no true ideas, it is only to say there is something else, something beyond.

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

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

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.

Most great art is freedom within form. Without form, we are amateurs, without freedom, we are robots.

...a beggar's kingdom is better than a proud man's delusion.

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

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.

My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and there are some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.

We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It's written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn't, and if only this and only that, it would be beautiful again.

The greatest stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.

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.