Top 180 Eugene H. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Distance Quotes

2. “Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

3. “One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

4. “The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

5. “Waiting means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

6. “If you don’t take a Sabbath, something is wrong. You’re doing too much, you’re being too much in charge. You’ve got to quit, one day a week, and just watch what God is doing when you’re not doing anything.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

7. “We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

8. “My job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

9. “Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has a time of harvest. All suffering, pain, emptiness, disappointment is seed: sow it in God and He will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

11. “No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

12. “Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

13. “Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

14. “Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

15. “Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what’s best – As above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You’re in charge!”

— Eugene H. Peterson

16. “Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

17. “Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God’s conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

18. “People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

19. “Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

20. “Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

21. “God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

22. “Love is not a word that describes my feelings; it is not a technique by which I fulfill my needs; it is not an ideal, abstract and pure, on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence with or in response to God in relation to persons.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

23. “Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be – you get a fresh start, your slate’s wiped clean. Count yourself lucky – God holds nothing against you and you’re holding nothing back from Him.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

24. “Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

25. “All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

26. “The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God’s creative genius is endless.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

27. “There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible – at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

28. “Suffering attracts fixers the way road-kills attract vultures.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

29. “O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

30. “We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don’t see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

31. “There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

32. “When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

33. “The life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which Gods grace and love are expereinced.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

34. “I believe God takes the things in our lives – family, background, education – and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don’t think God wastes anything.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

35. “Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

36. “That’s the whole spiritual life. It’s learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

37. “The silence that makes it possible to hear God speak also makes it possible for us to hear the world’s words for what they really are – tinny and unconvincing lies.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

38. “Hope commits us to actions that connect with God’s promises. What we call hoping is often only wishing. We want things we think are impossible, but we have better sense than to spend any money or commit our lives to them. Biblical hope, though, is an act – like buying a field in Anathoth. Hope acts on the conviction that God will complete the work that he has begun even when the appearances, especially when the appearances, oppose it.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

39. “The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We’re called to have people follow Jesus. We’re called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

40. “Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

41. “If we get our information from the biblical material there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

42. “It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

43. “No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most “entire” context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God’s revelation.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

44. “I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God’s business.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

45. “It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

46. “Resurrection does not have to do exclusively with what happens after we are buried or cremated. It does have to do with that, but first of all it has to do with the way we live right now. But as Karl Barth, quoting Nietzsche, pithily reminds us: “Only where graves are is there resurrection.” We practice our death by giving up our will to live on our own terms. Only in that relinquishment or renunciation are we able to practice resurrection.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

47. “How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion? How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?”

— Eugene H. Peterson

48. “It’s essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory. Art is the primary way in which this happens. It’s the primary way in which we become what we see or hear.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

49. “A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she acquires an appetite for the world of grace.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

50. “If people don’t know their pastor, it’s easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It’s also easy for pastors, who don’t know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers.”

— Eugene H. Peterson