Top 380 Donald Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.”

— Donald Miller

102. “I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn’t. It’s a chocolate thing.”

— Donald Miller

103. “Christians might say that you can’t live a more meaningful life without Jesus. Well, that’s absolutely not true. You can. You can enjoy a sunrise whether you know Jesus or not.”

— Donald Miller

104. “One of the things I associate with God is a sunrise. How many sunrises have you missed over the years, and God created that?”

— Donald Miller

105. “Life is a dance toward God, I began to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing out practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.”

— Donald Miller

106. “If what you are doing is important, you will encounter resistance. If what you are doing isn’t important it will be easy.”

— Donald Miller

107. “It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don’t have integrity, life becomes exhausting.”

— Donald Miller

108. “If we knew how much God loved us and was for us, we’d talk to Him all day long.”

— Donald Miller

109. “I can’t do it. It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes. You don’t decide those things, they just happen to you. If God is real, He needs to happen to me.”

— Donald Miller

110. “I think writers can get a little melodramatic sometimes about their work, and it helps me not to do that, to just say, “Well, this is how I make a living, and I need to become a very good craftsman.””

— Donald Miller

111. “Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.”

— Donald Miller

112. “The very scary thing about religion, to me, is that people actually believe God is who they think He is.”

— Donald Miller

113. “People trust those who understand them, and they trust brands that understand them too.”

— Donald Miller

114. “Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe.”

— Donald Miller

115. “Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God’s love will.”

— Donald Miller

116. “It’s funny what happens to you when part of your heart gets born inside somebody else.”

— Donald Miller

117. “It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple.”

— Donald Miller

118. “We don’t think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.”

— Donald Miller

119. “I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, ‘This is my idea and here’s all the reasons that it’s right.’ It doesn’t make for very compelling reading.”

— Donald Miller

120. “I think it’s very hard for us, for Christians, to understand that it’s okay to read a book, for instance, on how to manage your time. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

— Donald Miller

121. “God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me specifically into the story, and He put us in specifically with the sunsets in the rainstorms as though to say, “Enjoy your place in My story, the very beauty of it means it’s not about you, and in time that will give you comfort.”

— Donald Miller

122. “People are lonely. They want company and your book can provide them company and a little bit of hope. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

— Donald Miller

123. “The entire world is falling apart because nobody will admit they are wrong.”

— Donald Miller

124. “I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy’s notion of his father.”

— Donald Miller

125. “Every human being wakes up each morning and sees the world through the lens of a protagonist. The world revolves around us, regardless of how altruistic, generous, and selfless a person we may be.”

— Donald Miller

126. “I want to start replacing my “fix” response with an “enjoy” response and just let people be themselves.”

— Donald Miller

127. “If a piece of genius comes, it comes, and it if doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

— Donald Miller

128. “The sexual conquest is huge with men in terms of affirming themselves and their feelings of masculinity. That’s a misguided kind of affirmation. That is not helpful, but that stuff happens.”

— Donald Miller

129. “Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.” His voice was like thunder now. “You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.”

— Donald Miller

130. “Naked people look funny when they are for-real naked, outside-a-magazine naked.”

— Donald Miller

131. “I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love it’s enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.”

— Donald Miller

132. “If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.”

— Donald Miller

133. “The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vaccum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in life.”

— Donald Miller

134. “When we talk about the decline of the American family, I think we have to go back to the Industrial Revolution.”

— Donald Miller

135. “I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.”

— Donald Miller

136. “Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God’s, with feet like trees and a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation.”

— Donald Miller

137. “Most of us are waiting. We’re waiting for something interesting to happen. And I think we’re going to wait forever if we don’t do something more interesting with our lives.”

— Donald Miller

138. “Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.”

— Donald Miller

139. “If you want to bond with your friends, do something very hard with them, something that you won’t be able to do alone.”

— Donald Miller

140. “Lets choose to do something really difficult, something that saves lives, and let’s do that thing with people we love.”

— Donald Miller

141. “I heard once that real love doesn’t ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else’s pack, lessen his load, and if it gets reciprocated, that’s great, but that isn’t what you did it for.”

— Donald Miller

142. “When I say I love you and you don’t believe me, you’re being a jerk. Basically what you’re saying is I only love conditionally. You think you’re being self-deprecating and funny, but you’re really saying I’m not a good enough person to love you if you have a few flaws. It gets old.”

— Donald Miller

143. “Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they’re shy.”

— Donald Miller

144. “The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.”

— Donald Miller

145. “Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It’s like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.”

— Donald Miller

146. “The strongest character in a story isn’t the hero, it’s the guide.”

— Donald Miller

147. “Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all.”

— Donald Miller

148. “What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.”

— Donald Miller

149. “I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.”

— Donald Miller

150. “Almost without exception the most beautiful, selfless people I’ve met are ones who’ve experienced personal tragedy.”

— Donald Miller