Top 160 Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

2. “The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

3. “The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

4. “The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor... Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

5. “The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

6. “Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

7. “The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

8. “Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

9. “As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

10. “You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

11. “Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff’s office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

12. “Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

13. “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves. The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

14. “Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

15. “Our waiting is not nothing. It is something – a very big something – because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

16. “It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

17. “The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

18. “When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, ‘Here, I guess, since this is where I am.’”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

19. “I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

20. “With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

21. “As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, “People of the Book risk putting the book above people.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

22. “If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet? As difficult as it is to accept, I believe that his death on the cross reveals the God who suffers for love instead of punishing the unloving, the God who lays down his life for his friends.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

23. “The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

24. “Susan B. Anthony. “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” she once said, “because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

25. “I can’t help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

26. “To be fully human is perhaps why I’m Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

27. “According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

28. “Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

29. “Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

30. “Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

31. “I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

32. “If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at the same time shame over my inability to speak of God without a thousand qualifiers, doubt about the health of my soul, and barely suppressed contempt for those who have no such qualms. These are the areas of my proficiency.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

33. “If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

34. “I’ve got a hold of something that won’t move. It’s a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

35. “Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought.1 – Gautama Buddha.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

36. “I am not sure whether the virtue of holy envy requires holy humility or creates it, but the two are clearly related. After you have allowed the other to define herself, listening carefully to all the ways in which she is not you, it is hard to overlook the fact that you and she are made of the same basic material. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

37. “After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

38. “I’m a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like “Christian.””

— Barbara Brown Taylor

39. “The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

40. “When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

41. “Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

42. “I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

43. “I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I’ll capitalize both of those R’s, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it’s what is most real.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

44. “Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

45. “Humanity can be pretty stinky.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

46. “It just seems helpful to admit that Christianity is as complicated and conflicted as any other religion, with groups of followers who can believe in the unity of their faith even as they refuse Communion to one another.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

47. “I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I’ve relaxed enormously since then. I’m the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

48. “I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

49. “Ask anyone what she means when she says ‘God’ and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

50. “Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish – separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor