Top 180 Eugene H. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

52. “I am busy because I am lazy. I indolently let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself. It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

53. “An honest answer is like a warm hug.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

54. “If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

55. “Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

57. “That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

58. “People learn to shop for churches; there is no loyalty to the church. They’re consumers being attracted to one product or another. I think it’s sacrilege, to tell you the truth, it really is.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

59. “When you are part of a megachurch, you have no responsibility to anybody else.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

60. “You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

61. “One of the reasons that Christians read Scripture repeatedly and carefully is to find out just how God works in Jesus Christ so that we can work in the name of Jesus Christ.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

62. “Isn’t it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?”

— Eugene H. Peterson

63. “I didn’t write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

64. “Pastors need to know what’s going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

65. “My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

66. “Love? Yes, God loves us. But his love is passionate and seeks faithful, committed love in return. God does not want tame pets to fondle and feed; he wants mature, free people who will respond to him in authentic individuality. For that to happen there must be honesty and truth. The self must be toppled from its pedestal. There must be pure hearts and clear intelligence, confession of sin and commitment in faith.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

67. “We’ve all met a certain type of spiritual person. She’s a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She’s not a selfish person. But she’s always at the center of everything she’s doing.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

68. “The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, ‘Let us worship God.’ If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

69. “Gabriel Marcel wrote that life is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be explored.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

70. “The task of the prophet is not to smooth things over but to make things right.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

71. “Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

72. “The moment the organic unity of belief and behaviour is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

73. “American culture is probably the least Christian culture that we’ve ever had because it is so materialistic and it’s so full of lies. The whole advertising world is just, it’s just intertwined with lies, appealing to the worst of the instincts we have.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

74. “Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

75. “The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

76. “The Spirit works through community. Somebody will have a stupid, screwy idea. That’s okay. The point of having creeds and confessions and traditions is to keep us in touch with the obvious errors.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

77. “Reading is a gift, but only if the words are taken into the soul – eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

78. “There is no way that I can preach the gospel to these people if I don’t know how they are living, what they are thinking and talking about. Preaching is proclamation, God’s word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

79. “I think pastors are the worst listeners. We’re so used to speaking, teaching, giving answers. We must learn to be quiet, quit being so verbal, learn to pay attention to what’s going on, and listen.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

80. “When God wanted to guarantee his promises, he gave his word, a rock-solid guarantee – God can’t break his word. And because his word cannot change, the promise is likewise unchangeable.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

81. “I don’t want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of creation right now, any time now. Pay attention.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

82. “In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There’s too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

83. “There is an enormous gap between what we think we can do and what God calls us to do.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

84. “If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

85. “Congregation is composed of people, who, upon entering a church, leave behind what people on the street name or call them. A church can never be reduced to a place where goods and services are exchanged. It must never be a place where a person is labeled. It can never be a place where gossip is perpetuated. Before anything else, it is a place where a person is named and greeted, whether implicitly or explicitly, in Jesus’s name. A place where dignity is conferred.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

86. “Neither explaining suffering nor offering a program for the elimination of suffering, Lamentations keeps company with the extensive biblical witness that gives dignity to suffering by insisting that God enters our suffering and is companion to our suffering.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

87. “Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

88. “We do not qualify as biblical simply by quoting the Bible. We are biblical only when we share life in the wilderness with those who are tempted and fall, when we carry the cross of Jesus, and when we love extravagantly in Jesus’s name.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

89. “Real life, the real world, is a vast theater of salvation, directed by our wise and totally involved God.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

90. “There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

91. “There is something about Christmas that requires a rug rat. Little kids make Christmas fun. I wonder if could rent one for the holidays. When I was tiny we would by a real tree and stay up late drinking hot chocolate and finding just the right place for the special decorations.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

92. “As long as matters are really hopeful,” wrote Chesterton, “hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

93. “Joel Henderson was once asked how he had managed to write all those books. He replied that he had never written a book. All he did was write one page a day. With his limited energy and restricted imagination, a page at a time was all that he could manage. But when a year was up he had a 365-page book.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

94. “Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, ‘What does this mean?’ but ‘What can I obey?’ A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

95. “The mark of a certain kind of genius is the ability and energy to keep returning to the same task relentlessly, imaginatively, curiously, for a lifetime. Never give up and go on to something else; never get distracted and be diverted to something else.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

96. “William Faulkner was once asked how he went about writing a book. His answer: “It’s like building a chicken coop in a high wind. You grab any board or shingle flying by or loose on the ground and nail it down fast.” Like becoming a pastor.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

97. “Religion is a very scary thing, because a pastor is in a position of power. And if you use that power badly, you ruin people’s lives, and you ruin your own life.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

98. “When it comes to doing something about what is wrong in the world, Jesus is best known for his fondness for the minute, the invisible, the quiet, the slow – yeast, salt, seeds, light. And manure.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

99. “Any understanding of God that doesn’t take into account God’s silence is a half truth – in effect, a cruel distortion – and leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by leaders who are quite willing to fill in the biblical blanks with what the Holy Spirit never tells us.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

100. “The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.”

— Eugene H. Peterson