Top 35 Diana Butler Bass Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.”

— Diana Butler Bass

2. “Hospitality is the practice that keeps the church from becoming a club, a members-only society.”

— Diana Butler Bass

3. “We are safer and happier when we care for each other in community, when we do things for each other.”

— Diana Butler Bass

4. “Why is it that the choice among churches always seems to be the choice between intelligence on ice and ignorance on fire?”

— Diana Butler Bass

5. “Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.”

— Diana Butler Bass

6. “Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make.”

— Diana Butler Bass

7. “That it is precisely when we recognize our common humanity – when we recognize our own humanity in the face of the other – it is then that we also recognize the face of God.”

— Diana Butler Bass

8. “Conversion is not a single prayer. Conversion is pilgrimage.”

— Diana Butler Bass

9. “Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal. – John F. Kennedy.”

— Diana Butler Bass

10. “Doctrine is to be the balm of a healing experience of God, not a theological scalpel to wound and exclude people.”

— Diana Butler Bass

11. “The baby, the star, and the wise men: a story of gifts and radical gratitude. Joy to the world!”

— Diana Butler Bass

12. “What we need is here. – Wendell Berry.”

— Diana Butler Bass

13. “But some contemporary believers, such as Lisa Domke, a pastor and mother in Seattle, ground their identity in Christ’s love but a love that goes beyond sentiment or feeling. “I say that I am someone seeking to live in the world with love and humility,” Lisa reports, “following God in the way of Jesus.” Love is the active practice of Christian virtue. As Sky, a Seattle Baptist, relates, “Children know that love is behavior, not romantic words.”

— Diana Butler Bass

14. “The Internet is the stained glass picture of the 21st century.”

— Diana Butler Bass

15. “Where do you live?′ is ultimately a sacred question.”

— Diana Butler Bass

16. “With social media, you have the chance to be the Lutherans that Luther imagined.”

— Diana Butler Bass

17. “To transform home is to transform the world.”

— Diana Butler Bass

18. “While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger. Unlike almost every other contested idea in early Christianity, including the nature of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, the unanimous witness of the ancient fathers and mothers was that hospitality was the primary Christian virtue.”

— Diana Butler Bass

19. “It is just mortifying to be a Christian, except for the Jesus part. – Anne Lamott.”

— Diana Butler Bass

20. “The deepest and most important spiritual lessons I ever learned came from a circle of drunks, fighting desperately not to drink today, whom I initially viewed as low-life losers, and who ultimately came to be for me the oracles of God. The Twelve Steps in no way diminished my appreciation for the gospel of Jesus Christ – quite the contrary – I am more convinced than ever of the reality of the gospel story.”

— Diana Butler Bass

21. “Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness, and gratefulness is a measure of our aliveness. – DAVID STEINDL-RAST.”

— Diana Butler Bass

22. “Gratitude is, however, more than just an emotion. It is also a disposition that can be chosen and cultivated, an outlook toward life that manifests itself in actions – it is an ethic.”

— Diana Butler Bass

23. “Grace – gifts given without being earned and with no expectation of return –.”

— Diana Butler Bass

24. “The moment that we think we know, we’ve lost our perspective on wisdom.”

— Diana Butler Bass

25. “We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is. – Paul Tillich.”

— Diana Butler Bass

26. “That’s the best thing about little sisters: they spend so much time wishing they were elder sisters that in the end they’re far wiser than the elder ones could ever be. – Gemma Burgess.”

— Diana Butler Bass

27. “While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger.”

— Diana Butler Bass

28. “The overarching narrative of the Bible is that of humanity searching for home.”

— Diana Butler Bass

29. “I’m waiting now, but I will be ready. We are mutual participants, you and I, intertwined.”

— Diana Butler Bass

30. “There is no one experience of gratitude; rather, it is a complex and episodic thing, and one that is deeply personal.”

— Diana Butler Bass

31. “Whereas militant Christianity triumphs over all, generative Christianity transforms the world through humble service to all. It is not about victory; it is about following Christ in order to seed human community with grace.”

— Diana Butler Bass

32. “When someone asks me what kind of Christian I am,” says Brent Bill, a Quaker writer, “I say I’m a bad one.” He goes on to say, “I’ve got the belief part down pretty well, I think. It’s in the practice of my belief in everyday life where I often miss the mark.” Finally, he states, “I see myself as a pilgrim – traveling the faith path to the destination of being a good Christian – and into the eternal presence of God.”

— Diana Butler Bass

33. “Much of what passes for gratitude today appears to be a sort of secular prosperity gospel.”

— Diana Butler Bass

34. “In normal life one is not at all aware that we always receive infinitely more than we give, and that gratitude is what enriches life.”

— Diana Butler Bass

35. “Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined.”

— Diana Butler Bass

36. “Throughout the first five centuries people understood Christianity primarily as a way of life in the present, not as a doctrinal system, esoteric belief, or promise of eternal salvation. By followers enacting Jesus’s teachings, Christianity changed and improved the lives of its adherents and served as a practical spiritual pathway. This way – and earliest Christians were called “the People of the Way” – bettered existence for countless ancient believers.”

— Diana Butler Bass

37. “I learned new things about myself, about God, about life – all of it possible only because I was fired. I feel thankful.”

— Diana Butler Bass