Top 380 Donald Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “This means that when we ramble on and on about how we have the biggest manufacturing plant on the West Coast, our customers don’t care. Why? Because that information isn’t helping them eat, drink, find a mate, fall in love, build a tribe, experience a deeper sense of meaning, or stockpile weapons in case barbarians start coming over the hill behind our cul-de-sac. So what do customers do when we blast a bunch of noise.”

— Donald Miller

252. “I believed if word got out about grace, the whole church was going to turn into a brothel.”

— Donald Miller

253. “Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.”

— Donald Miller

254. “It’s a phone call in the morning to pray about our day, a text-message to say I’m thinking of her, a handwritten note, a postcard when I’m out of town on business, remembering what drink she likes when we’re at a bar, asking follow-up questions about her friends, and not hiding behind humor when it’s time for a serious conversation.”

— Donald Miller

255. “Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.”

— Donald Miller

256. “The most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.”

— Donald Miller

257. “Customers are not interested in your story. They are, rather, interested in being invited into a story that has them surviving and winning in the end.”

— Donald Miller

258. “Imagine your customer is a hitchhiker. You pull over to give him a ride, and the one burning question on his mind is simply Where are you going? But as he approaches, you roll down the window and start talking about your mission statement, or how your grandfather built this car with his bare hands, or how your road-trip playlist is all 1980s alternative. This person doesn’t care.”

— Donald Miller

259. “I used to write when I was in the mood or felt inspired. Anymore, I write whether I feel inspired or not. It’s a discipline. So that’s definitely different. It’s part of maturing as a person and as a professional.”

— Donald Miller

260. “Instead of asking what it feels like to follow God or be used by God, we should be asking who God is, and whether we really know Him. Everything else will take care of itself.”

— Donald Miller

261. “The reality is this, though: a healthy person coupled with an unhealthy person will still result in an unhealthy relationship.”

— Donald Miller

262. “Simply put, we must show people the cost of not doing business with us.”

— Donald Miller

263. “Relationships are teleological. They’re all going somewhere and they’re turning us into something, hopefully something better, something new.”

— Donald Miller

264. “People attack out of fear.”

— Donald Miller

265. “It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can’t explain, bad and terrible things.”

— Donald Miller

266. “For so much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole, but it isn’t a religious system, it is people following Christ; and the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus.”

— Donald Miller

267. “We have to be taught to be good. It doesn’t come natural.”

— Donald Miller

268. “I don’t find anyone more noble than Jesus.”

— Donald Miller

269. “After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn’t handle the full brunt of reality.”

— Donald Miller

270. “I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”

— Donald Miller

271. “The devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God.”

— Donald Miller

272. “And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it’s not natural to want to die.”

— Donald Miller

273. “I talk about love, forgiveness, social justice; I rage against American materialism in the name of altruism, but have I even controlled my own heart? The overwhelming majority of time I spend thinking about myself, pleasing myself, reassuring myself, and when I am done there is nothing to spare for the needy.”

— Donald Miller

274. “I began to wonder what life would be like if I dropped the act and began to trust that being myself would be enough to get the love I needed.”

— Donald Miller

275. “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 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. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway?”

— Donald Miller

276. “You are wired like you and I am wired like me. The more fully we live into ourselves, the more impact we will have. Acting may get us the applause we want, but taking a risk on being ourselves is the only path toward true intimacy. And true intimacy, the exchange of affection between two people who are not lying, is transforming.”

— Donald Miller

277. “I read through the book of Matthew this evening. I was up all night. I couldn’t stop reading so I read through Mark. This Jesus of yours is either a madman or the Son of God. Somewhere in the middle of Mark I realized He was the Son of God.”

— Donald Miller

278. “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. In my opinion, that’s even better than a miracle. I’d rather earn the money than win the lottery because there’s no joy in a reward unless it comes at the end of a story.”

— Donald Miller

279. “Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.”

— Donald Miller

280. “If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.”

— Donald Miller

281. “I guess what I am saying is, I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn’t God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching the people around us that life just isn’t worth living.”

— Donald Miller

282. “The times in my life when I have been most happy haven’t been the times when I have had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I’ve been in love or in community or right with people.”

— Donald Miller

283. “If I use the Bible to prove I am right, I have yet to be humbled by the beautiful truths of the Bible.”

— Donald Miller

284. “I’ve come to believe a person’s love for you can’t grow unless you hold that person loosely.”

— Donald Miller

285. “One of the things I love about our source text as Christians, the Bible, is that it teaches us not to avoid conflict. And it teaches us that before the fall of man, in Paradise, there was conflict. God wants conflict to be a part of your life.”

— Donald Miller

286. “Lucy doesn’t read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just is a dog.”

— Donald Miller

287. “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. I wonder how many people get tempted by the gains they can make by playing a role, only to pay for those temptations in public isolation.”

— Donald Miller

288. “I started ‘Storyline’ after I’d accomplished all my goals and still wasn’t happy. I’d become a ‘New York Times’ bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.”

— Donald Miller

289. “We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.”

— Donald Miller

290. “We were meant to enjoy life, not be drowned by it.”

— Donald Miller

291. “Nancy is a great friend! We highly recommend Nancy and her team!” While those are nice words, they do very little in telling a story of transformation.”

— Donald Miller

292. “The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.”

— Donald Miller

293. “Half the time I pick up a book, that’s what I’m trying to get.”

— Donald Miller

294. “Remarkably, the most common regret of the dying was this: they wish they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them.”

— Donald Miller

295. “I thought about how there are so many lies in fear. So much deception. What else keeps us from living a better story than fear?”

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

297. “People who live great stories know failure isn’t a judgment, it’s an education.”

— Donald Miller

298. “The whole experience makes me wonder if the time we spend trying to become somebody people will love isn’t wasted because the most powerful, most attractive person we can be is who we already are, an ever-changing being that is becoming and will never arrive, but has opinions about what is seen along the journey.”

— Donald Miller

299. “I posted the first three chapters and I had enough people say that chapter two was dragging that I cut it out just before the book went to press. And I’m glad I did. The book is a lot better without it.”

— Donald Miller

300. “I think the devil has tricked us into thinking so much of biblical theology is story fit for kids.”

— Donald Miller