Top 380 Donald Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “G. K. Chesterton says chess players go crazy, not poets. I think he is right.”

— Donald Miller

152. “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

153. “True intimacy, the exchange of affection between two people who are not lying, is transforming.”

— Donald Miller

154. “Don’t let go of your strength or your beauty. It was given to you by God.”

— Donald Miller

155. “Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father’s face lit up.”

— Donald Miller

156. “Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things.”

— Donald Miller

157. “My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children’s fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.”

— Donald Miller

158. “We don’t need as much as we have. Hardly any of us need as much money as we have. It’s true what they say about the best things in life being free.”

— Donald Miller

159. “So I wrote. I wrote as though God thought my voice mattered. I wrote because I believed a human story was beautiful, no matter how small the human was. I wrote because I didn’t make myself, God did. And I wrote like he’d invited me to share my true “self” with the world.”

— Donald Miller

160. “Here’s a thing I’ve noticed: the greatest leaders, the ones who impact the world the most, are somehow able to turn the other cheek. It’s as though they believe so solidly in love, so robustly in forgiveness, they have the ability to forgive and even love those who attack them.”

— Donald Miller

161. “Oprah Winfrey, an undeniably successful guide to millions, once explained the three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard, and understood. This is the essence of empathy.”

— Donald Miller

162. “A good story makes you thankful to be alive because it reminds you that while sometimes painful, life is indeed beautiful and even magical.”

— Donald Miller

163. “Reality is like fine wine: it does not appeal to children.”

— Donald Miller

164. “If our identity gets broken, it affects our ability to connect. And I wonder if we’re not all a lot better for each other than we previously thought. I know we’re not perfect, but I wonder how many people are withholding the love they could provide because they secretly believe they have fatal flaws.”

— Donald Miller

165. “Your Customers Are Not Curious About You, They Are Curious About How You Can Solve Their Problem.”

— Donald Miller

166. “You’re assuming that love is a feeling. It isn’t. It can involve feelings, but often it doesn’t. Love acts out of faith, which rarely involves feelings. Love is action; it’s deciding something is true and living out of that belief.”

— Donald Miller

167. “Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.”

— Donald Miller

168. “Here are two things I found taking the long road, though: Applause is a quick fix. And love is an acquired taste.”

— Donald Miller

169. “I think that’s the true litmus test for someone who has become closer to Jesus: their heart is more loving, accepting, childlike, less believing that they have all the answers and more believing in Him.”

— Donald Miller

170. “I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love.”

— Donald Miller

171. “The greatest stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.”

— Donald Miller

172. “And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.”

— Donald Miller

173. “It is no coincidence that Jesus talks endlessly about love. Free love. Unconditional love.”

— Donald Miller

174. “When we look back on our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out.”

— Donald Miller

175. “Pain then, if one could have faith in something greater than himself, might be a path to experiencing a meaning beyond the false gratification of personal comfort.”

— Donald Miller

176. “In church, the rules of the lifeboat don’t apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.”

— Donald Miller

177. “The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.”

— Donald Miller

178. “The ambitions we have will become the stories we live.”

— Donald Miller

179. “Flattery has a short battery life, but reminding people they are amazing and precious and wanted and works of art can truly change their lives.”

— Donald Miller

180. “In every line of copy we write, we’re either serving the customer’s story or descending into confusion; we’re either making music or making noise.”

— Donald Miller

181. “He said jazz music was invented by the first generation out of slavery. I thought that was beautiful because, while it is music, it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul. It is as if the soul is saying something, something about freedom.”

— Donald Miller

182. “If the abortion issue is important to me, this is how you tackle that issue.”

— Donald Miller

183. “I don’t mean to overstate what is yet unknown, but part of me believes when the story of earth is told, all that will be remembered is the truth we exchanged. The vulnerable moments. The terrifying risk of love and the care we took to cultivate it. And all the rest, the distracting noises of insecurity and the flattery and the flashbulbs will flicker out like a turned-off television.”

— Donald Miller

184. “Most great art is created when the artist feels they are channeling something rather than trying to communicate something.”

— Donald Miller

185. “The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn’t preachy.”

— Donald Miller

186. “The point of a story is never about the ending, remember. It’s about your character getting.”

— Donald Miller

187. “What if some of the most successful people in the world got that way because their success was fueled by a misappropriated need for love? What if the people we consider to be great are actually the most broken? And what if the whole time they’re seeking applause they are missing out on true intimacy because they’ve never learned how to receive it?”

— Donald Miller

188. “I didn’t want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn’t want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.”

— Donald Miller

189. “I’m not a pastor; I’ve never been on staff at a church.”

— Donald Miller

190. “I am willing to sound dumb. I am willing to be wrong. I am willing to be passionate about something that isn’t perceived as cool. I am willing to express a theory. I am willing to admit I’m afraid. I’m willing to contradict something I’ve said before. I’m willing to have a knee-jerk reaction, even a wrong one. I’m willing to apologize. I’m perfectly willing to be perfectly human.”

— Donald Miller

191. “I’m perfectly willing to be perfectly human.”

— Donald Miller

192. “Love can’t be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other.”

— Donald Miller

193. “God doesn’t give us crying, pooping children because he wants to advance our careers.”

— Donald Miller

194. “There’s no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.”

— Donald Miller

195. “I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the thing we need.”

— Donald Miller

196. “I no longer believe love works like a fairy tale but like farming. Most of it is just getting up early and tilling the soil and then praying for rain. But if we do the work, we just might wake up one day to find an endless field of crops rolling into the horizon.”

— Donald Miller

197. “Then, Paul remembered a Bible verse from 1 John. He said that John, in summarizing all that he’d learned about God, said this: “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” “When you are with God,” Paul said, “there is no darkness, ho hiding, no pretending. When you are with God, you have the freedom and courage to be yourself.”

— Donald Miller

198. “Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won’t be meaningful.”

— Donald Miller

199. “When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.”

— Donald Miller

200. “Relationships matter. They matter as much as exercise and nutrition. And not all relationships help us reach our goals. God doesn’t give us crying, pooping children because he wants to advance our careers. He gives them to us for the same reason he confused language at the Tower of Babel, to create chaos and deter us from investing too much energy in the gluttonous idols of self-absorption.”

— Donald Miller