Donald Miller Quotes

“Where there is an absence of story, or perhaps a bad story, a good storyteller walks in and changes reality. He doesn’t critique the existing story, or lament about his boredom, like a critic. He just tells something different and invites other people into the new story he is telling.”

“Fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”

“We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given.”

“I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.”

“A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.”

“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.”

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

“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 can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me.”

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

“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”

“I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought.”

“How disappointing would it be get to heaven and find out God created life to be enjoyed while all we did was worry?”

“I’ve wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment.”

“We don’t need as much as we have. Hardly any of us need as much money as we have. It’s true what they say about the best things in life being free.”

“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”

“People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren’t . . . The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February.”

“The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is ‘Do not fear.’ It’s in there over two hundred timesm . . . It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around.”

“What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.”