Top 280 Brennan Manning Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.”

— Brennan Manning

202. “Drinking gave me a rush of confidence, and for a boy hounded by feelings of inadequacy, the buzz was a welcome relief. What was impossible to realize at the time was that I was shooting myself in the head in some strange time warp where the bullet takes many years to finally reach its target.”

— Brennan Manning

203. “Jesus expected the most of every man and woman; and behind their grumpiest poses, their most puzzling defense mechanisms, their coarseness, their arrogance, their dignified airs, their silence, and their sneers and curses, Jesus sees a little child who wasn’t loved enough – a least of these who had ceased growing because someone had ceased believing in them.”

— Brennan Manning

204. “If you took the love of all the best mothers and fathers who have lived in the course of human history, all their goodness, kindness, patience, fidelity, wisdom, tenderness, strength, and love and united all those qualities in a single person, that person’s love would only be a faint shadow of the furious love and mercy in the heart of God the Father addressed to you and me at this moment.”

— Brennan Manning

205. “All our actions – eating, drinking, sleeping, working – are thus potentially Christ’s actions. But this potential must be actualized. Instead of a mindless drifting through the insignificant, apparently superficial and nonreligious events of the day, our passive union with Christ can be made active by creative acts of the will, intelligence and imagination.”

— Brennan Manning

206. “Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.”

— Brennan Manning

207. “When we give anything more priority than we give to God, we commit idolatry. Thus we all commit idolatry countless times every day.”

— Brennan Manning

208. “When belonging to an elite group eclipses the love of God, when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead. When God gets relegated to second place behind any bauble or trinket, I have swapped the pearl of great price for painted fragments of glass.”

— Brennan Manning

209. “The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.”

— Brennan Manning

210. “The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.”

— Brennan Manning

211. “TO BE GRATEFUL for an unanswered prayer, to give thanks in a state of interior desolation, to trust in the love of God in the face of the marvels, cruel circumstances, obscenities, and commonplaces of life is to whisper a doxology in darkness.”

— Brennan Manning

212. “Faith means believing that I am Yours and You are mine, that I am who You say I am: Your beloved, fearfully and wonderfully accepted.”

— Brennan Manning

213. “Perhaps the gut issue is not how much theology we have studied or how much Scripture we have memorized. All that really matters is this: Have you experienced the furious longing of God or not?”

— Brennan Manning

214. “But if I’ve learned anything about the world of grace, it’s that failure is always a chance for a do-over.”

— Brennan Manning

215. “One of life’s greatest paradoxes is that it’s in the crucible of pain and suffering that we become tender.”

— Brennan Manning

216. “Failure to recognize the value of mere being with God, as the beloved, without doing anything, is to gouge the heart out of Christianity.”10.”

— Brennan Manning

217. “Becoming a little child meant becoming aware that all is gift, that I am helpless and powerless to add a single inch to my spiritual stature. Without the subjective awareness of utter dependence, the personal consciousness of a dynamism outside of self at work in us, I seriously question whether anyone has made real progress in the spiritual life.”

— Brennan Manning

218. “Cultic worship is not only hypocritical but absolutely meaningless if it is not accompanied by love for other people; for in such a way it cannot possibly be a way of giving thanks to God.”

— Brennan Manning

219. “Freedom in Christ produces a healthy independence from peer pressure, people-pleasing, and the bondage of human respect.”

— Brennan Manning

220. “Without the sharing of personal experience, prophetic preaching is impossible.”

— Brennan Manning

221. “God’s love is based on nothing, and the fact that it is based on nothing makes us secure. Were it based on anything we do, and that ‘anything’ were to collapse, then God’s love would crumble as well. But with the God of Jesus no such thing can possibly happen. People who realize this can live freely and to the full.”

— Brennan Manning

222. “What makes the Kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions.”

— Brennan Manning

223. “I am flabbergasted by the widespread refusal across this land to think big about a loving God. Like nervous thoroughbreds being guided to the starting gate at Churchill Downs, many Christians bray, bridle, and bolt at the revelation of God’s all-embracing love in Jesus Christ.”

— Brennan Manning

224. “Shakespeare described love as an “ever-fixed mark.” In a healthy family, you know how love is defined: It’s clear, has boundaries, and is attainable. Unfortunately, in a shame-bound family, love is a moving target; one day it’s this and one day it’s that, and just when you’re sure you’ve got it figured out, you discover you don’t.”

— Brennan Manning

225. “A shriveled humanity has a shrunken capacity for receiving the rays of God’s love.”

— Brennan Manning

226. “One of the mysteries of the gospel tradition is this strange attraction of Jesus for the unattractive, this strange desire for the undesirable, this strange love for the unlovely. The key to this mystery is, of course, Abba. Jesus does what He sees the Father doing; He loves those whom the Father loves.1.”

— Brennan Manning

227. “The tendency in legalistic religion is to mistrust God, to mistrust others, and consequently, to mistrust ourselves.”

— Brennan Manning

228. “The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.”

— Brennan Manning

229. “I believe that Christianity happens when men and women experience the reckless, raging confidence that comes from knowing the God of Jesus Christ.”

— Brennan Manning

230. “In days long ago when there were no spiritual directors or brilliant commentaries on Scripture, fidelity to God’s will was the whole of spirituality.”

— Brennan Manning

231. “My message, unchanged for more than fifty years, is this: God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be.”

— Brennan Manning

232. “Buechner wrote, “We have always known what was wrong with us. The malice in us even at our most civilized. Our insincerity, the masks we do our real business behind. The envy, the way other people’s luck can sting us like wasps. And all the slander, making such caricatures of each other that we treat each other like caricatures, even when we love each other. All this infantile nonsense and ugliness. ‘Put it away!’ Peter says. ‘Grow up to salvation!’ For Christ’s sake, grow up.”

— Brennan Manning

233. “One spiritual writer has observed that human beings are born with two diseases: life, from which we die; and hope, which says the first disease is not terminal. Hope is built into the structure of our personalities, into the depths of our unconscious; it plagues us to the very moment of our death. The critical question is whether hope is self-deception, the ultimate cruelty of a cruel and tricky universe, or whether it is just possibly the imprint of reality.”

— Brennan Manning

234. “Dear Abba, I have had glimpses of enlightenment, quicksilver encounters that have allowed me to say a little more of who You are. But they’ve just been the tip of the iceberg. Give me the eyes to not merely notice but see. Give me the ears to not only hear but listen. Give me the courage to further touch Your scars. I want to taste more and digest more of the riches of the mystery that is You. Help me come to my senses, and know You better.”

— Brennan Manning

235. “The more guilt and shame that we have buried within ourselves, the more compelled we feel to seek relief through sin.”

— Brennan Manning

236. “Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, “God told me... ” As they make their way through the world, they bear wordless, prophetic witness.”

— Brennan Manning

237. “I am convinced that without a gutlevel experience of our profound spiritual emptiness, it is not possible to encounter the living God.”

— Brennan Manning

238. “Against insurmountable obstacles and without a clue as to the outcome, the trusting heart says, ‘Abba, I surrender my will and my life to you without any reservation and with boundless confidence, for you are my loving Father.”

— Brennan Manning

239. “When I am divided within myself, when I am so preoccupied with my own sins, egocentricity, and moral failures that I cannot hear the anguished cry of others, then I have subtly reestablished self as the center of my focus and concern.”

— Brennan Manning

240. “But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible but not relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft and true witnesses without being manipulative.”

— Brennan Manning

241. “Life can be taken out of others in rivulets and drops, in the small daily failures of inattention, that bitterest fruit of self-absorption, as surely as by terrible strokes to their hearts.”

— Brennan Manning

242. “How is it then that we’ve come to imagine that Christianity consists primarily in what we do for God? How has this come to be the good news of Jesus?”

— Brennan Manning

243. “The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there.”

— Brennan Manning

244. “We are not pro-life simply because we are warding off death. We are pro-life to the extent that we are men and women for others, all others; to the extent that no human flesh is a stranger to us; to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love, to the extent that for us there are no “others.”

— Brennan Manning

245. “Those were days of learning the reality behind the phrase I’ve often used, “ruthless trust.” It’s something easy to say but much harder to live. But I have learned in my life that grace often gestates, like an unborn child. And when the expectant mother grabs the hospital-prepared suitcase and screams, “Let’s go!” then you’d better go.”

— Brennan Manning

246. “The disciple living by grace rather than law has undergone a decisive conversion – a turning from mistrust to trust. The foremost characteristic of living by grace is trust in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.”

— Brennan Manning

247. “No one, it seems to me, who has fully grasped the Crucifixion can ever again take seriously any expression or instrument of worldly power, however venerable, glittering, or seemingly formidable. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE.”

— Brennan Manning

248. “Winston Churchill said it well: “Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.”

— Brennan Manning

249. “The life of Jesus suggests that to be like Abba is to show compassion.”

— Brennan Manning

250. “God’s grace always precedes his call.”

— Brennan Manning