Top 380 Donald Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “They never tell you when you get born a control freak it will cost you a healthy love life. But it’s true. You can’t control somebody and have intimacy with them at the same time. They may stay because they fear you, but true love casts out fear.”

— Donald Miller

203. “Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me.”

— Donald Miller

204. “The heart responds to the conflict within a story.”

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

206. “Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.”

— Donald Miller

207. “Never assume people understand how your brand can change their lives. Tell them.”

— Donald Miller

208. “All relationships are living and alive and moving and becoming something.”

— Donald Miller

209. “The economy is turning around, so that’s going to help a little bit.”

— Donald Miller

210. “I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.”

— Donald Miller

211. “The people I used to be surrounded by are getting along without me. Somehow, that really bugs me.”

— Donald Miller

212. “What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We are all like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given – it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.”

— Donald Miller

213. “I’m starting to wonder if the whole point of life is to be thankful and to live in such a way others are thankful for theirs as well.”

— Donald Miller

214. “I want to be with people who are humble and hungry, have healthy relationships, and are working to create new and better realities in the world.”

— Donald Miller

215. “It’s all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn’t conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.”

— Donald Miller

216. “Imagine how much a man’s life would change if he trusted that he was loved by God.”

— Donald Miller

217. “I think that’s why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don’t get that, they feel as though they’re going to die. And so they lash out. But it’s a terrible thing to wake up and realize the person you just finished crucifying wasn’t Jesus.”

— Donald Miller

218. “When two people are entirely and completely separate they are finally compatible to be one. Nobody’s self-worth lives inside of another person. Intimacy means we are independently together.”

— Donald Miller

219. “What do markets do? They consolidate, they breakout, they extend, they overextend, they back and fill, they consolidate, and repeat the process. That’s all you need to know about the markets.”

— Donald Miller

220. “It’s a beautiful moment when somebody wakes up to this reality, when they realize God created them so other people could enjoy them, not just endure them.”

— Donald Miller

221. “The more I try to impress people, the more I separate myself from them. Vulnerability attracts love.”

— Donald Miller

222. “There are about 360,000 churches in America, so we could mentor a million kids within a short period of time if everyone signed on, which, of course, is a pipedream, but we’re going to reach toward that.”

— Donald Miller

223. “My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and there are some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.”

— Donald Miller

224. “We both have our independence and freedom, but we have those things with each other. It’s a paradox, but it works. It all reminded me of what my friend Henry Cloud told me, that when two people are entirely and completely separate they are finally compatible to be one. Nobody’s self-worth lives inside of another person. Intimacy means we are independently together.”

— Donald Miller

225. “We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people... That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.”

— Donald Miller

226. “It’s true: if we live behind a mask we can impress but we can’t connect.”

— Donald Miller

227. “A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.”

— Donald Miller

228. “There’s a lot of letters, and a lot of people come say “hi” at book signings, but I’m amazed at how normal everybody is.”

— Donald Miller

229. “It’s true the manipulator is the loneliest person in the world. And the second loneliest is the person being manipulated. Unless we’re honest with each other, we can’t connect. We can’t be intimate. Only God can penetrate a manipulative person’s heart, and even then, he sits quietly, waiting for them to stop running their con.”

— Donald Miller

230. “When a relationship is right, it is no more possible to wake up and want out of the marriage than it is to wake up and stop believing in God. What is, is what is.”

— Donald Miller

231. “In my opinion the misappropriation of the longing for God has caused a lot of people a great deal of pain. In fact, I wondered if some of my early mistakes in relationships weren’t partly because I sought to find resolution for the longing through a woman, a burden no romantic partner should have to bear. How many relationships have been ruined by two people attempting to squeeze the Jesus out of each other?”

— Donald Miller

232. “It blew my mind that what I was thinking was actually applicable to people’s lives, and it certainly revolutionized family.”

— Donald Miller

233. “I think it is easier to do bad things than to do good things. And there is something in that basic fact, some little clue to the meaning of the universe.”

— Donald Miller

234. “If you buy the website, maybe you’ll do something with it. But so far I haven’t; we’ll see.”

— Donald Miller

235. “It’s possible to do both as a writer – to engage and have a family and all that good stuff – and I chose not to for the sake of the career.”

— Donald Miller

236. “I’m a writer because, at an early age, I became convinced it was the one thing I could do to earn people’s respect. It’s true in the process I learned to love words and ideas and these days I actually like to get lost in the writing process. But the early fuel, the early motivation, was all about becoming a person worth loving.”

— Donald Miller

237. “I tend to connect most easily with two kinds of people, those who are creating something and those who are easily vulnerable. Both trees grow from the same root, I think, and that’s the willingness to take risks.”

— Donald Miller

238. “After all, to love somebody is to give them the power to hurt you, and nobody can hurt you if you’re the only one writing the script.”

— Donald Miller

239. “To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.”

— Donald Miller

240. “Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn’t feel meaningless.”

— Donald Miller

241. “It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”

— Donald Miller

242. “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.”

— Donald Miller

243. “Great writers know what to cut out. It’s the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.”

— Donald Miller

244. “When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn’t normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.”

— Donald Miller

245. “They are lonely. I’m not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.”

— Donald Miller

246. “The most attractive characteristic in a person is the story they are telling the world. We stop and stare at stories.”

— Donald Miller

247. “You can’t memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.”

— Donald Miller

248. “I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.”

— Donald Miller

249. “All my books have been titled based on a piece of the prose from inside the book.”

— Donald Miller

250. “It is worthy of note that the Chinese and Japanese characters for money and gold are the same.”

— Donald Miller