Brennan Manning Quotes

117 Sourced Quotes

A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.

Brennan Manning
When being is divorced from doing, pious thoughts become an adequate substitute for washing dirty feet.

Brennan Manning
Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of KNOWING Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.

Brennan Manning
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
Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, "God told me..." As they make their way through the world, they bear wordless, prophetic witness.

Brennan Manning
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
In human beings, love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is His identity.

Brennan Manning
Do you honestly believe God likes you, not just loves you because theologically God has to love you?

Brennan Manning
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
We are not cowed into timidity by death and life. Were we forced to rely on our own shabby resources we would be pitiful people in deed. But the awareness of Christ's present risenness persuades us that we are buoyed up and carried on by a life greater than our own.

Brennan Manning
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
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
Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.

Brennan Manning
When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments and the surprises of the Spirit.

Brennan Manning
I knew there was only one place to go. I sank down into the center of my soul, grew still, and listened to the Rabbi's heartbeat.

Brennan Manning
As we come to grips with our own selfishness and stupidity, we make friends with the impostor and accept that we are impoverished and broken and realize that, if we were not, we would be God. The art of gentleness toward ourselves leads to being gentle with others — and is a natural prerequisite for our presence to God in prayer.

Brennan Manning
Jesus was victorious not because he never flinched, talked back, or questioned, but having flinched, talked back, and questioned, he remained faithful.

Brennan Manning
This is the God of the gospel of grace. A God who, out of love for us, sent the only Son He ever had wrapped in our skin. He learned how to walk, stumbled and fell, cried for His milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit, was fixed to a cross, and died whispering forgiveness on us all.

Brennan Manning
The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.

Brennan Manning
The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness.

Brennan Manning
The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can't save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.

Brennan Manning
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
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
Hope your wildest hopes, dream your maddest dreams, imagine your most fantastic fantasies. Where your hopes and your dreams and your imagination leave off, the love of my Heavenly Father only begins.

Brennan Manning
Letting ourselves be loved by God is more important than loving God.

Brennan Manning
When absolute control and rigid obedience pose as love within the family and the local faith-community, we produce trained cowards rather than Christian persons.

Brennan Manning
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
We miss Jesus' point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others.

Brennan Manning
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
The gospel will persuade no one unless it has so convicted us that we are transformed by it.

Brennan Manning