Top 160 Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “What I know and most of them do not yet is that even people who belong to the same religion do not agree about what they mean when they say ‘God.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

53. “I’ll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I’ll go there.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

54. “The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

55. “I found myself in a maze where I’d taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn’t doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

56. “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

57. “Once, at the end of a field trip to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, the imam ended his meeting with students by saying, ‘Our deepest desire is not that you become Muslim, but that you become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best person you can be. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Thank you for coming.’ Then he was gone, leaving me with a fresh case of holy envy.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

58. “Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel all night long if there were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

59. “As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The divine presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

60. “Even when light fades and darkness falls – as it does every single day, in every single life – God does not turn the world over to some other deity... Here is the testimony of faith; darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

61. “We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light. – Hildegard of Bingen.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

62. “The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, ‘We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

63. “Do you have a body? Don’t sit on the porch! Go out and walk in the rain! If you are in love, then why are you asleep? Wake up, wake up! You have slept millions and millions of years. Why not wake up this morning?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

64. “I didn’t want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

65. “A priest is a priest, no matter where she happens to be. Her job is to recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God. Her job is to speak in ways that help other people recognize the holiness in things too.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

66. “When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best – and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

67. “Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

68. “I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

69. “People ask me: why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do? The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. – M. F. K. Fisher.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

70. “The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you,” he said, “by the grace of God.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

71. “I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

72. “At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

73. “I remained aware enough of social sins to be surprised when religious people wanted to focus on sexual sins instead. I suppose that when poverty, crime, and degradation of the environment start looking unbeatable, then it is predictable that people will shift their attention to an enemy who seems easier to attack.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

74. “During the day it is hard to remember that all the stars in the sky are out there all the time, even when I am too blinded by the sum to see them.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

75. “There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

76. “In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

77. “Our lives are inextricably bound up with the lives of other people. So much depends on things we can never control.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

78. “As natural as it may be to want to play on the winning team, the wish to secure divine favoritism strikes me as the worst possible reason to practice any religion. If the man who asked that question could not think of a dozen better reasons to be a Christian than that, then what, indeed, was he doing there?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

79. “Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

80. “When this young priest received my news with grace instead of anger, he reminded me that salvation is not something that happens only at the end of a person’s life. Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

81. “To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

82. “Contrary to popular opinion, all religions are not alike. Their followers see the world in very distinct ways. Their understandings of the human condition proceed from different assumptions, leading them to propose different remedies. If I had been able to resist the wisdom they offered me – if I had been able to keep my Christian glasses on, so that I only saw what those prescription lenses allowed me to see – then I might have emerged unchanged. But that is now how it went for me.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

83. “Effective people are busy people. Religious people are busy people. For millions and millions of people, busy-ness is The Way of Life. “How are you?” “Busy like crazy, but what else is new? And you?” Some busy people cannot even tell the difference between relaxation and narcolepsy, because the minute they sit down in a quiet place alone, they nod off.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

84. “The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

85. “Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

86. “Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

87. “One of the quietest revolutions in Religion 101 follows a student’s recognition that he or she has a worldview, a particular way of viewing reality that it is not the only way. A worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

88. “Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

89. “So of course when it came time to decide what to do with my life, I decided to go to seminary. What else do you do when you are in love with God?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

90. “Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

91. “I spent a great deal of time trying to be good, but was good the same as whole?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

92. “I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that’s entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

93. “I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

94. “For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

95. “When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book – not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

96. “The wind smelled like the moon. I went up there so many times in the weeks that followed that I no longer remember which night it was that God finally answered my prayer. I do not think it was right at the beginning, when I was still saying my prayers in words. I think it came later, when I had graduated to inchoate sounds. Up on that fire escape, I learned to pray the way a wolf howls. I learned to pray the way that Ella Fitzgerald sang scat.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

97. “Most of us do not live especially holy lives, after all. We spend most of our time sitting in traffic, paying bills, and being irritated with one another. Yet every week we are invited to stop all of that for one hour at least. We are invited to participate in a great drama that has been going on without us for thousands of years, and one that will go on as long as there is a single player left standing.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

98. “I was so busy serving the Divine Presence that we never got any time alone anymore.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

99. “E. B. White once wrote, “I can’t decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

100. “Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor