Don Miller Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

I'm saying that a lot of Christians want to be recognized for their godliness, and a lot of people mistake the recognition for godliness itself.

Don Miller
For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.

Don Miller
I associated much of Christian doctrine with children's stories because I grew up in church. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

Don Miller
It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

Don Miller
Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.

Don Miller
Poppycock religion is America's new faith. It is easy. It is quick. It allows a person to feel spiritual, seem intellectual, have a faith to follow, and have something interesting to talk about over coffee. Poppycock is the quick-fix diet of the spiritual industry. It sells. It rarely threatens or confronts the seeker, allowing each to forge his own individual "religion." The poppycock believer changes the rules as he goes. If he misses a basket, he will say that a missd basket is still worth two points. The poppycock believer does not serve his god, rather his god serves him. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Don Miller
It gives me great confidence and pride to think that, had the Israelites been influenced by German engineering, Paul and Timothy might have journeyed in an old Volkswagen camping van.

Don Miller
There is this lie floating around that says I am supposed to be able to do life alone, without any help, without stopping to worship something bigger than myself. But I actually believe there is something bigger than me, and I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.

Don Miller
But I think that God does not so much take us from point A to point B in the physical world as He takes us from not knowing Him to knowing Him.

Don Miller
It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, look out from within our reality, that is would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater that reality, or it would not be reasonable.

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

Don Miller
God made a whole beautiful earth and decided to put you in it, to experience all of this beauty. You can't do that watching television all the time.

Don Miller
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

Don Miller
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.

Don Miller
It is always the simple things that change our lives.

Don Miller
When a relationship is right, it is no more possible to wake up and want out of the marriage than it is to wake up and stop believing in God. What is, is what is.

Don Miller
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.

Don Miller
It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.

Don Miller
I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Don Miller
I do not belive that I have a thinking problem as much as a feeling problem. What I mean is, I know the Christian answer to most quesitons but I do not always live accordingly. I am not pagan. But my "goodness" is the product of moral upbringing, not of a coherent biblical worldview. I tend do to and thing as I feel like doing and thinking. There is rarely an exception. I am guided by Pavlovian instincts. Church culture has a vocabulary, and I have learned it well. There is a dress code too, and my clothes are well within the acceptable parameters, I wear Dockers and plaid shirts, as is silently required of twenty-something Christians. I only vote Republican, which is also silently required.

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

Don Miller
Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.

Don Miller
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.

Don Miller
If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.

Don Miller
How many people have damaged their own lives by mistaking enablement for grace?

Don Miller
If honesty is the key to intimacy, it means we don't have to be perfect and we don't have to pretend to be perfect.

Don Miller
Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.

Don Miller
I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth.

Don Miller
True intimacy, the exchange of affection between two people who are not lying, is transforming.

Don Miller
I heard once that real love doesn't ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else's pack, lessen his load, and if it gets reciprocated, that's great, but that isn't what you did it for.

Don Miller