Top 70 Dan B. Allender Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Most people want to grow, but the price of growth is pain.”

— Dan B. Allender

2. “Buzyness, however, is moral laziness because it involves refusing to live with courage and intentionality.”

— Dan B. Allender

3. “Bold love is courageously setting aside our personal agenda to move humbly into the world of others with their well-being in view, willing to risk further pain in our souls, in order to be an aroma of life to some and an aroma of death to others.”

— Dan B. Allender

4. “Healing comes when our story is raw, bone-deep and full of hunger for what only Jesus can offer.”

— Dan B. Allender

5. “If we want to create a different future, we must have the courage to look at the past.”

— Dan B. Allender

6. “The work of restoration cannot begin until a problem is fully faced.”

— Dan B. Allender

7. “Strength is found in weakness. Control is found in dependency. Power is found in surrender.”

— Dan B. Allender

8. “If you are a leader, it is not possible to be at peace with all and friends with everyone.”

— Dan B. Allender

9. “So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It’s time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze.”

— Dan B. Allender

10. “The absence of tumult, more than its presence, is an enemy of the soul. God meets you in your weakness, not in your strength. He comforts those who mourn, not those who live above desperation. He reveals Himself more often in darkness than in the happy moments of life.”

— Dan B. Allender

11. “Courage never takes away fear; courage simply redistributes fear to get the job done.”

— Dan B. Allender

12. “Every addiction is an attempt to slay hope.”

— Dan B. Allender

13. “Life is war, and marriage provides us with a close and intimate ally with whom we may wage this war. The battle requires bold love, forgiveness, confrontation, and repentance.”

— Dan B. Allender

14. “Christ never intended to cover up the dark side of life, but rather to illuminate a path through it.”

— Dan B. Allender

15. “Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another’s glory or toward degrading each other.”

— Dan B. Allender

16. “Our story will gain momentum and depth only to the degree that we honestly embrace both loss and fear.”

— Dan B. Allender

17. “Love cannot last without a foundation of forgiveness.”

— Dan B. Allender

18. “For most leaders, humility comes only by wounds suffered from foolish falls.”

— Dan B. Allender

19. “What originally led us to serve others by leading them seldom remains our North Star.”

— Dan B. Allender

20. “One of the best sources of perspective is enemies. If we can learn from them, then we can profit from anyone.”

— Dan B. Allender

21. “God is not bound by time, nor is our story. We desperately want our situation to be solved. We want resolution. But, God unfolds the plot in His own time. It is in our months or years of waiting that our story comes to maturity. It is over a lifetime of stories that he turns our desire toward Him.”

— Dan B. Allender

22. “To experience brokenness and humiliation all you have to do is lead.”

— Dan B. Allender

23. “A reluctant leader is highly suspicious of people who work to accumulate and hoard power.”

— Dan B. Allender

24. “In order to reclaim the joy and passion of leadership, we must walk the valley of the shadow of death and name the cost of leadership.”

— Dan B. Allender

25. “Stories don’t give answers, but they do offer perspective.”

— Dan B. Allender

26. “Grace. Loss. Fortune. Hardship. Victory. Sometimes the worst seat is best seat in the house and it comes as a result of leading.”

— Dan B. Allender

27. “To dream alone is fantasy if it doesn’t move the heart to act.”

— Dan B. Allender

28. “The more you openly name your struggles, the less people can use your silence as a back door to blackmail you, to sabotage your leadership, or to subvert relationships within the organization.”

— Dan B. Allender

29. “The more we walk the path first while becoming last and least in our organizations, the more we become like the Alpha and Omega whom we long to serve.”

— Dan B. Allender

30. “It is God’s design to use reluctant servants to usher in glory.”

— Dan B. Allender

31. “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”5.”

— Dan B. Allender

32. “You may obey a leader who has power and authority, but you will not strive to serve her or the cause of the organization unless you respect and care for her in addition to the ones with whom you serve.”

— Dan B. Allender

33. “Beginning with the first day of life outside the womb, every child is asking two core questions: ‘Am I loved?’ and ‘Can I get my own way?’ These two questions mark us throughout life, and the answers we receive set the course for how we live.”

— Dan B. Allender

34. “Sane, reasonable, play-it-safe people are not sufficiently engaged in life to generate great stories. Instead, they sit back and wait for a leader-storyteller to come along and get them caught up in a life worth living.”

— Dan B. Allender

35. “Idealism may get us into the fray, but it is the loss of all we cherish that begins to form in us a heart capable of leading others reluctantly and humbly.”

— Dan B. Allender

36. “Repentance is an internal shift.”

— Dan B. Allender

37. “But the part of ourselves we hate the most is our longing to be wanted and enjoyed.”

— Dan B. Allender

38. “If you lead, you will eventually serve with Judas or Peter.”

— Dan B. Allender

39. “If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours.”

— Dan B. Allender

40. “Hope is not mere optimism; rather, it is moving forward in anticipation of redemption in spite of the improbability of rescue.”

— Dan B. Allender

41. “Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lover, and it separates us from Him and brings death as it wars against His will.”

— Dan B. Allender

42. “We are not to work on the Sabbath because it takes us out of the play of joy. It is as bizarre as making love to your spouse, but getting out of bed during the process to cut your lawn or wash dishes. Such an offense would do far more than spoil the mood; it would be a direct assault on the integrity of joy, announcing that a mundane chore is more pleasurable than sexual joy with your spouse.”

— Dan B. Allender

43. “Speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don’t stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop.”

— Dan B. Allender

44. “Tension is the medium in which we breathe every day.”

— Dan B. Allender

45. “The only parameter that is to guide our Sabbath is delight. Will this be merely a break or a joy? Will this lead my heart to wonder or routine? Will I be more grateful or just happy that I got something done?”

— Dan B. Allender

46. “The desire for beauty, the hunger for union, the passion to be part of something greater than self, all arise out of our bent to worship.”

— Dan B. Allender

47. “The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is nothing, and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.”

— Dan B. Allender

48. “Grief is freeing, but regret is the cul de sac of despair.”

— Dan B. Allender

49. “The triggering event and resulting shame is worse than being rejected because rejection assumes a path by which to return to acceptability. The fear involved in shame is of permanent abandonment, or exile. Those who see our reprehensible core will be so disgusted and sickened that we will be a leper and an outcast forever.”

— Dan B. Allender

50. “In every story, in every life, there are moments of death that take away our name and rename us as strangers, orphans or widows. At the moment of being unnamed, we are thrown into our story. We lose the name Friend and are given the name Reject.”

— Dan B. Allender