Top 380 Donald Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

256. “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

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

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Donald Miller

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Donald Miller

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he’s going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy.”

— Donald Miller

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Donald Miller

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Donald Miller

278. “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

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

— Donald Miller

280. “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

281. “Just out of high school, you didn’t realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.”

— Donald Miller

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Donald Miller

292. “90 percent of people’s problems could be prevented if they’d choose healthier people to give their hearts to.”

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

296. “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

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

— Donald Miller

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

— Donald Miller

299. “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

300. “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