Top 280 Bob Goff Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It has always seemed to me that broken things, just like broken people, get used more; it’s probably because God has more pieces to work with.”

— Bob Goff

152. “If we pick recognition over influence we’ll be known for all the wrong stuff.”

— Bob Goff

153. “Jesus lets us be real with our life and our faith.”

— Bob Goff

154. “I used to think that real love involved falling for someone; but now I think it usually involves standing for someone.”

— Bob Goff

155. “We won’t figure out what’s sacred in life if we settle for what’s safe.”

— Bob Goff

156. “We get to be God’s plan for the whole world by pointing people toward Him.”

— Bob Goff

157. “Our failures can leave behind pavement or potholes. Our ability to receive grace determines which it will be.”

— Bob Goff

158. “Be ambitious about things that last.”

— Bob Goff

159. “That’s one of those things about love. It always assumes it can find a way to express itself.”

— Bob Goff

160. “When you are in high school, you don’t give much thought to what you can’t do. For most people, that gets learned later, and for still fewer, gets unlearned for the rest of life.”

— Bob Goff

161. “You become like the people you hang around, and to a great degree, you end up going wherever they’re headed.”

— Bob Goff

162. “I don’t think success is what we’ve made of ourselves; I think it’s what we’ve made of others.”

— Bob Goff

163. “We need to replace what we’ve settled for with what we’ve been longing for.”

— Bob Goff

164. “Accepting the invitation to show up in life is about moving from the bleachers to the field. It’s moving from developing opinions to developing options. It’s about having things matter to us enough that we stop just thinking about those things and actually do something about them. Simply put, Jesus is looking for us to accept the invitation to participate.”

— Bob Goff

165. “The clarity of purpose, undistracted energy, selfless love, and unselfish pursuits you bring to the world will be your legacy. Everything else will look like a distraction by comparison.”

— Bob Goff

166. “The thing I love about God is He intentionally guides people into failure. He made us be born as little kids who can’t walk or talk or even use a bathroom correctly. We have to be taught everything. All that learning takes time, and He made us so we are dependent on Him, our parents, and each other. The whole thing is designed so we try again and again until we finally get it right. And the whole time He is endlessly patient.”

— Bob Goff

167. “If you are a sincere friend, folks around you will quickly understand that there’s no hidden agenda and nothing on the other side of the equals sign – just you.”

— Bob Goff

168. “The people you spend time with will play the largest part in the ambitions you achieve, not the minutes you saved each day by avoiding them. Be available. Talk to everyone. Become their student, not their teacher. Love’s goal isn’t ever efficiency; it’s presence.”

— Bob Goff

169. “You’ll be able to spot people who are becoming love because they want to build kingdoms, not castles. They fill their lives with people who don’t look like them or act like them or even believe the same things as them. They treat them with love and respect and are more eager to learn from them than presume they have something to teach.”

— Bob Goff

170. “What I’ve been doing with my faith is this: instead of saying I’m going to believe in Jesus for my whole life, I’ve been trying to actually obey Jesus for thirty seconds at a time.”

— Bob Goff

171. “It’s given me a lot of comfort knowing we’re all rough drafts of the people we’re still becoming.”

— Bob Goff

172. “Loving people means caring without an agenda. As soon as we have an agenda, it’s not love anymore. It’s acting like you care to get someone to do what you want or what you think God wants them to do. Do less of that, and people will see a lot less of you and more of Jesus.”

— Bob Goff

173. “People who used to want power are willing to serve. People who used to chase money freely give it away. People who used to beg others for acceptance are now strong enough to give love.”

— Bob Goff

174. “When joy is a habit, love is a reflex.”

— Bob Goff

175. “God doesn’t give us a recipe for living as a community, but He gives us great ingredients: He gives us everybody, always. If we’re going to get it right, it’s going to take everybody to pull it off. It won’t get done in a day or two either. It’s going to take always.”

— Bob Goff

176. “We don’t need to call everything we do “ministry” anymore either. Just call it Tuesday. That’s what people who are becoming love do.”

— Bob Goff

177. “I spend a great deal of time working for kids in Uganda and India and chasing bad guys who hurt them. I started a nonprofit a number of years ago and now Sweet Maria and I think about my day job as a great way to fund the things we’re doing. Now when I put on a suit and tie or jump on a plane to go take a deposition, we call it “fund-raising.” It still makes me grin every time to say it this way. It’s like a really successful bake sale to get rid of bad guys.”

— Bob Goff

178. “The promise of love and grace in our lives is this: Our worst day isn’t bad enough, and our best day isn’t good enough. We’re invited because we’re loved, not because we earned it.”

— Bob Goff

179. “In the Bible there’s a guy named Timothy who gets a letter from another guy named Paul. Paul is like an older brother to Timothy. In the letter, Paul tells him to watch out for people who act holy but don’t get their holiness from Jesus but from the stuff they’ve done, which is pure delusion. Paul called this kind of religious devotion a form of godlessness, meaning it’s the exact opposite of what it’s pretending to be.”

— Bob Goff

180. “I used to be afraid that if I was authentic I might take a hit, but now I know that being real means I will take a hit.”

— Bob Goff

181. “It’s hard to believe Jesus loves the van thieves and all the difficult people we’ve met just the same as you and me.”

— Bob Goff

182. “When we want something that bad, it’s easy to mistake what we truly need for the thing we really want. When this sort of thing happens, and it seems to happen to everyone, I’ve found it’s because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road.”

— Bob Goff

183. “What I like about Jesus is that He didn’t try to recruit people or use spin. Neither He nor His disciples ever said they were going on a mission trip, because they weren’t. He just invited everyone and said they could follow Him.”

— Bob Goff

184. “When we get our security from Christ, we no longer have to look for it in the world, and that’s a pretty good trade.”

— Bob Goff

185. “Secretly incredible people keep what they do one of God’s best-kept secrets because the only one who needs to know, the God of the universe, already knows.”

— Bob Goff

186. “I think God speaks something meaningful into our lives and it fills us up and helps us change the world regardless of ourselves and our shortcomings. His name for us is His beloved. He hopes that we’ll believe Him like I came to believe what the coach said about me. He hopes we’ll start to see ourselves as His beloved rather than think of all of the reasons that we aren’t.”

— Bob Goff

187. “Love one another.” What is simple often isn’t easy; what is easy often doesn’t last.”

— Bob Goff

188. “We were all meant to save many lives. God is always trying to save lives, and it seems like He usually uses the least likely people to do it.”

— Bob Goff

189. “I trust God because He’s the best author. I think God doesn’t spell out everything for us in life, but He does tell us how we can write our lives better; and trusting Him implicitly is always the right place to start.”

— Bob Goff

190. “Love cares more about who’s hurting than who’s watching.”

— Bob Goff

191. “You don’t need to know everything when you’re with someone you trust.”

— Bob Goff

192. “Keep this in mind, though: loving people the way Jesus did is always great theology.”

— Bob Goff

193. “God doesn’t just give us Himself. Sometimes He gives us a few other people in our lives whose voices we can trust. Figure out what Jesus’ voice sounds like in your life. He’s standing at the end of the track calling your name. Run as fast as you can in His direction.”

— Bob Goff

194. “When I think about satan, my thoughts go to how Jesus interacted with him in the desert. Jesus spoke with him for just a few seconds and then sent him away. Satan was a manipulator who wanted to control God, but Jesus had a relationship with God that satan didn’t understand, and Jesus had no problem telling him off and getting rid of him. I think we should do the same.”

— Bob Goff

195. “Decide in advance that you will do whatever it takes to get your heart right, and then do it- even if it will kill all previous versions of you. You need to ask yourself what makes your heart beat in ways that make you stronger, more courageous, more giving, and more loving. Figure out what makes your heart skip a beat with joy and what makes it miss a beat with disfunction and distraction.”

— Bob Goff

196. “Telling people what they should want turns us into a bunch of sheriffs. People who are becoming love lose the badge and give away grace instead. Tell the people you meet who they’re becoming, and trust that God will help people to find their way toward beautiful things in their lives without you.”

— Bob Goff

197. “Am I the right guy? I don’t know, but I’m the guy being asked, and the last thing I want to do is miss an opportunity or make God mad, so I just keep saying yes. Maybe God is doing some inexplicable things in your life. Each of us gets to decide every time whether to lean in or step back – to say yes, ignore it, or tell God why He has the wrong person.”

— Bob Goff

198. “There are plenty of people I don’t understand. I suppose some are trolls and some aren’t. God doesn’t see people the way I do, though. The ones I see as problems, God sees as sons and daughters, made in His image. The ones I see as difficult, He sees as delightfully different. The fact is, what skews my view of people who are sometimes hard to be around is that God is working on different things in their lives than He is working on in mine.”

— Bob Goff

199. “We don’t need to spend as much time as we do telling people what we think about what they’re doing. Loving people doesn’t mean we need to control their conduct. There’s a big difference between the two. Loving people means caring without an agenda. As soon as we have an agenda, it’s not love anymore. It’s acting like you care to get someone to do what you want or what you think God wants them to do. Do less of that, and people will see a lot less of you and more of Jesus.”

— Bob Goff

200. “God searches for us, no matter what dark place we’re in or what door we’re behind. He hears our impossible, audacious prayers for ourselves and others. And He delights in forgiving us and then answering those prayers by letting us return home to Him.”

— Bob Goff