Top 160 Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I always wondered why it took “three days” for significant things to happen in the Bible – Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, Jesus spent three days in the tomb, Paul spent three days blind in Damascus – and now I know. From earliest times, people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month they practiced resurrection.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

103. “Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in. I.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

104. “When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it’s losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my value was to God. I lost all of that at least.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

105. “I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

106. “We’re children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We’re also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

107. “The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

108. “I cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest I used to keep them in is smaller than a shoebox now. Most of the time, I feel so ashamed about this that I do not own up to it unless someone else mentions it first. Then we find a quiet place where we can talk about what it is like to feel more and more devoted to a relationship that we are less and less able to say anything about.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

109. “The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There’s a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

110. “We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

111. “When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

112. “I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

113. “God does some of God’s best work with people who are seriously lost.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

114. “I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

115. “A bed, in short, is where you face your nearness to or farness from God. Whether you are in pain or not, whether you are an anxious person or not – even, I think, whether you are a religious person or not – a bed is where you come face-to-face with what really matters because it is too dark for most of your usual, shallowing distractions to work. You can turn on the lights if you want, but they are all artificial. The most they can do is postpone your encounter with what really matters.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

116. “It’s difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

117. “I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God’s best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

118. “To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

119. “I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

120. “Tame worship is easier to agree on than any other kind, and bringing fire requires a lot more energy than simply showing up. When life is pretty good and church is pleasant enough, who needs resurrection?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

121. “The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn’t felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

122. “There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that’s what led to my downward spin.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

123. “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. Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

124. “The cost of the pretense was the loss of the real human texture underneath, but since we all thought that was what was expected of us, that was what we delivered.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

125. “Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

126. “It was when your partner left you that you remembered what else you meant to do in your life beyond staying together.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

127. “How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

128. “No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

129. “Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

130. “I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

131. “The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

132. “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.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

133. “Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

134. “You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you’re into a different kind of relationship.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

135. “Anyone who stands up in front of other human beings to speak knows what a frightful gift it is. This power of ours has no safety catch on it. We are as likely to make nothing out of something as the other way around.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

136. “Without benefit of maturity or therapy, I had no way of knowing that the darkness was as much inside me as it was outside me, or that I had any power to affect its hold on me.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

137. “That’s enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

138. “I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to find out what it was and obey.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

139. “I read science for the same reason I read theology: because I am a seeker after truth.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

140. “I’m in a mainline church, I’m very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations – very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

141. “The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

142. “To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. – Wendell Berry.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

143. “To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

144. “I don’t miss the ministry, because I’m completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

145. “Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way – once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

146. “I had lived so long in the mainstream that I never even though about how I sounded from the margins.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

147. “If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I’ve just quit being religious, because that’s what got me into such deep trouble.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

148. “The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don’t know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I’ve been in danger of losing.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

149. “To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

150. “This is worrisome, not only because he is reading a translation from the original Hebrew or Greek that has already involved a great deal of interpretation, but also because it is such a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor