Jon Foreman Quotes

Entropy is one of the laws of thermodynamics. It's a physical law that says everything in nature is moving from order to disorder. In our lives this same principle is at work. As time moves on, things break down as we make mistakes. This is the 'letdown' every person experiences because of sin. For Christians this concept doesn't end there because we realize God's 'beautiful' mercy and grace restores the order in our lives.

I have horrible acting ability. I can only be one thing and that's it. So for better, for worse, that's all I've got to offer is me. I've got nothing else.

The truth will set you free, but it's only slightly less scary than hell and a whole lot harder to get there.

I try to surf everyday or at least go for a walk on the beach if the waves are flat. The more I travel, the more I appreciate where I live and the ocean.

Just as drowning cannot be equated with swimming, mere existence is not the same as abundant life. We have been offered a new way to live – a new way to be human.

I am often tempted to think of success in terms that are defined by others: records sold, popularity gained, album reviews, etc. These are impossible demands, however, and they can never be satisfied. Letting finite others define our worth is a horrible way to live. Only the Infinite Other [God] has the authority to do this.

The tendency in today's culture is to want to be a 'star', but I want to be a servant.

There are tears that shine like a smile, sobbing like a sunrise for the truth.

I usually write from my own experience, and that's definitely a true statement for me. I think having a song about desiring to live and wanting to get it right, which many of my songs do, often I have to clarify that I haven't figured it out yet.

Music has always been a location for me to run to, whether it's through someone else's song or my own. I can observe my own planet from this foreign land and things make sense within the telescopic lens of song.

The song can be a little bit more of the mystery and leave the whole thing open ended. But there's something really gratifying about saying exactly what you mean.

Maybe truth is not something that I can possess. Maybe truth is something which possesses me.

Calling has this weight that somehow we think that your calling is fixed. That your calling is this line that you’ve finally found and now you're on that track and that’s what you’re gonna do forever and maybe that's the case. But I feel like calling has much more to to do with the moment that you’re in.

I want to be a compassionate soul, finding worth and beauty in the worlds around me and within me, attempting to sing a transcendent tune with my temporal position in this life.

I yearn to live and love and burn, and yet so much of my time is spent faking and forgetting, faking and forgetting I carry out my disbelief with uninspired hands, my eyes shut, my emotions dulled, my spirit numb. In times like these I am in desperate need of truth to come to me like a blinding light, like a splinter in my soul, reminding me of the brevity of my time here on earth.

I think that's a challenge as believers - how do you demonstrate the gospel? How do you do that? I mean it's easy to talk about it and say 'Oh this is what we are supposed to be doing' and this is the relevance. But how do you do that with your hands instead of your mouth? How do you do it every day, instead of just onstage, how is it enacted? And I feel like that is one of the ways that we can show what we believe, by how we treat people around the world.

For me, the good songs are the ones that come really naturally. There are certain songs that you rework and rewrite and the craft becomes very evident, but a lot of times those aren't my favorite songs. The favorite songs are the ones that I can't even hear my own voice in.

I'm very reluctant to put my words into God's mouth.

Anything worth doing in this world is incredibly difficult to do.

Sometimes the things that hurt are worth the pain.

Eventually everything fails me, but when I look at the sunset or the sky, I'm reminded what it's like to be alive.

What do we really want to say to the world? Three main themes. The inability to find completion in our modern society, the inability to find completion within ourselves, and the new way to be human in what Christ offers us - His love and His perfect plan of redemption for us.

Paste just might be my favorite music magazine. They have shed light on many incredible, under-appreciated folks over the years, helping me find new tunes to accompany me through life. We were honored to give a song in return.

Being a creator of a song I get to take all these broken fragments of failure and chaos and weave together something beautiful and meaningful. Decay. Death. Pain. Fall. And if God is a songwriter then these fallen leaves of mine can be redeemed

I think that's the beauty of live music - creating from the destruction.

I use to think that the friction was a bad thing. Everything is to ease pain in our society; pain is very much the enemy. And I don't think that's true. Tension is a good thing. To be pulled tight: that's the only way you can make a proper noise on the guitar or violin.

There is a deeper portion of our being that we rarely allow others to see. Call it a soul maybe, this is the place that holds the most value. All else can drift but this. When this dies our body has no meaning.

Life tears at us and scars us as children so we adopt facades and masks to hide this part of us, to keep this sacred part of ourselves from the pain.

If we truly believe in an all-powerful God, then there's going to be beauty and truth to be found in all sorts of different places.

Usually for me, the melodic structures come out in the water and the lyrical ideas could come from a book I'm reading.

I often use music as a handle for very emotionally explosive substances: love, sex, God, fear, doubt, politics, the economics of the soul - these are daunting thoughts in the back of my mind that I rarely visit without the safety gloves of song.

Inside all of us, we know the truth of life that there's something more than the next new cell phone or gadget or relationship and that our heart beats in time with the sunset.

For me, when I think about Christ, I think about this iconoclastic man who lived and died for the broken. And the paramount underdog, which is basically turning the world on it’s head. Blessed are the poor and blessed are the hungry, blessed are the broken, all these things that feel very backwards in our fame, power, beauty, riches hungry world. That’s who Christ is to me.

Faith, hope, and love remain. But the greatest of these is love.

I think that we’re a culture that runs away from death, for good reason. Nobody really wants to think about the fact that we’re going to be lifeless food for worms in a coffin someday. But at the same time, I feel like knowing that you’re going to die can be an incredibly rewarding, powerful knowledge. It inspires us to live in ways that we wouldn’t if we were ignorant. I feel like that has inspired me to care about every breath. For me it’s not a morbid curiosity, it’s just wanting to make sure that every moment I have here on the Earth while I am breathing is accounted for.

When our world falls apart and we have no more faces to wear - that’s when it’s beautiful, and that’s when we change.

From the shore, the ocean is forever. It's a beautiful, dangerous place. Music is tied to the sea, born from the struggle, looking for hope. Because hope belongs in the dark places.

I love the idea that you can create a world through song.

Jesus Christ's mercy and power indwells us and gives us the strength to make a positive difference.

That's what life is, a continual state of journey. You are a river passing downstream.

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. But when life hands you hurricanes, you go surfing.

There’s nothing that you can sell me that can make me happy.

You wake up, you wake up, another day, you wake up, you wake up, traffic still moving at the same speed, our eyes looking at the same speed, our minds thinking at the same speed, I wanna see movement, I wanna see change. I wanna wake up for real. I wanna wake up. I wanna wake up. We were meant to live.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love another.

I think despair and cynicism are two different things. On the flip side of hope is despair. Belief and doubt are the same thing, in that to believe something you have to actively doubt the opposite. And from my perspective, that's the deep end. You're dealing with the unknown; you're dealing with mystery.

I've never really had a desk job, but I've died one day at a time all over the place.

I simply want the music to to find its way to open-minded people.

Greed, envy, sloth, pride and gluttony: these are not vices anymore. No, these are marketing tools. Lust is our way of life. Envy is just a nudge towards another sale. Even in our relationships we consume each other, each of us looking for what we can get out of the other. Our appetites are often satisfied at the expense of those around us. In a dog-eat-dog world we lose part of our humanity.