Top 160 Erwin Raphael McManus Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When you begin to create the life of your dreams – or maybe better stated, when you begin to live the life that God dreams for you – you take responsibility to prepare for the future.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

102. “Whether we realize it or not, everything we do is an expression of either how alive our souls are or how much we have allowed ourselves to be deadened over time.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

103. “The Christian faith grew through story – not text. Only later did the stories become Scripture. While the Scripture must be held in the highest regard, we must not neglect the power of story.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

104. “Unfortunately, the people who have the greatest influence in our lives rarely understand the power of their words to shape who we become. They never fully understand that what informs us forms us. Words spoken into a soul are like the hands of a potter pressed against wet clay.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

105. “Great dreams require great courage.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

106. “All the evidence you need to prove God is waiting within you to be discovered.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

107. “God clarifies in the midst of obedience, not beforehand.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

108. “When you’re passionate about God, you can trust your passions.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

109. “I guess when I really think about it, God’s voice sounds a lot like my voice.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

110. “You need to remember who God is, forget the painful wounds and let Him renew you.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

111. “Courage frees us from the fears that would rob us of life itself.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

112. “The life of faith is less about gathering information than it is about expanding imagination. The movement Jesus started was a movement of dreamers and visionaries, not a movement of academics and theologians.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

113. “I refused to let go of what I had.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

114. “A person God himself deems as wise is one who not only hears His voice, but immediately begins to act upon His instruction.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

115. “To create is to reflect the image of God. To create is an act of worship.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

116. “The Ten Commandments are the lowest possible standard of humane living.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

117. “The first and most important step in the process of becoming genuinely is to be once again authenticated by the original designer.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

118. “True religion always moves us to serve others and to give our lives to see those oppressed find freedom.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

119. “It’s a wonderful thing when you look inside your own heart and like what you see.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

120. “Churches all over the country have decided they love their traditions more than their children.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

121. “The soul is both fragile and resilient... The artisan soul must be both tender and tough.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

122. “What is the future you’re creating right now?”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

123. “What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece?”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

124. “There is no proof of creativity without action.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

125. “To be apathetic is literally to be without passion.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

126. “Worship is not something we are called to so that God can reinforce his status. It is his way of calling us near.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

127. “If we choose to live a small life, we do not make enough room for a big GOD.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

128. “Genius is a gift we are given; mastery is the stewardship of our gifts.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

129. “We are most human when love is our motive.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

130. “Since part of our creative responsibility is to move from imagination to image, we need to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and allow our imagination once again to be the playground of God. And once our dreams and visions are the material that has been passed on to us by a divine imagination, then it is time to dream, to risk, and to create.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

131. “Who do we become when we stop allowing all the voices in our head to crowd out the one voice we must hear to come to life?”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

132. “If we are inherently spiritual creatures, we are by our nature creative beings, yet we live in the fear that if we aspire to be more we will discover ourselves to be less.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

133. “Frankly, the people who whine the most about how hard their lives are have very rarely experienced much to be disappointed about. They seem to find solace in their most negative memories, using these as a blank check that abdicates them from all personal responsibility. “I am how I am because of the pain of my past. If you had experienced what I have experienced, you would understand my bitterness, my anger, my paralysis, my despair.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

134. “This is perhaps why so many of us who know love fear love. We know that love is not the absence of pain. If anything, love is the promise of pain. No one has loved more deeply than God. Has anyone ever been more betrayed? God would not know suffering if He did not know love. But because He is Love, He chose to suffer on our behalf. Without love there is no glory in suffering.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

135. “The artisan soul is not about rebellion but about resonance.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

136. “It’s hard to tell a great story if we remain stuck in chapter one.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

137. “God is not a drug, and He certainly does not create experiences and emotions that make us feel better but not become better.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

138. “Jesus’s early followers formed a movement of dreamers and visionaries.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

139. “The warrior knows that their imagination is not a place to escape but to create.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

140. “In an ideal world, the voices that teach us language teach us self-respect, self-confidence, and self-esteem. Those same voices also form in us humility and gratitude, and as those voices inform our inner voices, they also pass on wisdom.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

141. “What if the creative act is not an act against God but a reflection of His image within us?”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

142. “It’s odd how we prioritize the things the things that matter to us. We choose a career or job; we choose a city or place to live. We make so many things important to us, but in all the things we factor in as we craft our futures, we make the people in our lives a commodity of, at best, secondary importance. We would take a job and give up our people rather than choose a tribe and give up the job.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

143. “I found a strange solace and safety in my power of invisibility and made obscurity my residence.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

144. “I have come to realize, after over thirty years of studying human creativity, that the great divide is not between those who are artists and those who are not, but between those who understand that they are creative and those who have become convinced that they are not.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

145. “Most people who describe themselves as visionaries are actually saying something quite different. They are abdicating their responsibility for the details. Details matter. The more someone or something matters to us, the more the details relating to them matter to us.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

146. “Who we were created to become already exists in the mind of God. It’s placed in our physical DNA and in the longings of our soul. Our lives are supposed to be a manifestation of the imagination of God, and whatever else we leave behind – the life we choose to live and the person we choose to become – is the ultimate expression of the artisan soul.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

147. “You also can’t move forward into your future when you are paralyzed by fear.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

148. “Jesus would rather have us do what is right than what is “Christian.” Earlier.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

149. “While we may never find or receive the love from others that our hearts are desperate for, we can receive a love even greater than that of which we were deprived.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus

150. “When we are freed from the rules and regulations that are so often imposed on us in the name of God, we discover that creativity is the natural result of spirituality. And if this is true, then our soul is the primary material for all artistic expression.”

— Erwin Raphael McManus