Top 180 Eugene H. Peterson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan. He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for a kingdom. A LONG OBEDIENCE.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

102. “My feelings are important for many things. They are essential and valuable. They keep me aware of much that is true and real. But they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about Him or my neighbors.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

103. “God’s great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

104. “When we read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music, than we can possibly absorb the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday’s newspaper.’12.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

105. “The core message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, but the setting for this is most often in the ordinariness of our lives. The new life takes place in the place and person of our present. It is not a means by which God solves problems. God creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

106. “There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

107. “The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

108. “So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

109. “Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. – 2 Corinthians 4:16.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

110. “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong” is the warning posted by H. L. Mencken.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

111. “The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts. Subjected.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

112. “It’s the set of the sail, and not the gale that determines the way they go.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

113. “The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

114. “Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All “word of God” vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

115. “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes. A.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

116. “Intentions must mature into commitments if we are to become persons with definition, with character, with substance.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

117. “The devil does some of his best work behind stained glass.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

118. “The unholy alliance of religion and politics collaborated in finding Jesus guilty.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

119. “Some of us try desperately to hold on to ourselves, to live for ourselves. We look so bedraggled and pathetic doing it, hanging on to the dead branch of a bank account for dear life, afraid to risk ourselves on the untried wings of giving. We don’t think we can live generously because we have never tried. But the sooner we start the better, for we are going to have to give up our lives finally, and the longer we wait the less time we have for the soaring and swooping life of grace.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

120. “This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure. But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

121. “I didn’t want to be a religious professional whose identity was institutionalized. I didn’t want to be a pastor whose sense of worth derived from whether people affirmed or ignored me. In short, I didn’t want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

122. “Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

123. “So watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times! 17 Don’t live carelessly, unthinkingly. Make sure you understand what the Master wants. 18-20 Don’t drink too much wine. That cheapens your life. Drink the Spirit of God, huge draughts of him. Sing hymns instead of drinking songs! Sing songs from your heart to Christ. Sing praises over everything, any excuse for a song to God the Father in the name of our Master, Jesus Christ.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

124. “I get asked, ‘What do you miss most about being a pastor?’ I think it’s the intimacy, the incredible gift of intimacy. You go through death with somebody, with their families, and there’s an intimacy that comes through that that is just incomparable.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

125. “One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly non- heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous models. That always comes as a shock to newcomers to Scripture: Abraham lied; Jacob cheated; Moses murdered and complained; David committed adultery; Peter blasphemed.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

126. “If we forget that the newspapers are footnotes to Scripture and not the other way around, we will finally be afraid to get out of bed in the morning. Too many of us spend far too much time with the editorial page and not nearly enough with the prophetic vision. We get our interpretation of politics and economics and morals from journalists when we should be getting only information; the meaning of the world is most accurately given to us by God’s Word.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

127. “Christian spirituality means living in the mature wholeness of the gospel. It means taking all the elements of your life – children, spouse, job, weather, possessions, relationships – and experiencing them as an act of faith. God wants all the material of our lives.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

128. “When it comes to dealing with God, most of us spend considerable time trying our own hands at either being or making gods. Jesus blocks the way. Jesus is not a god of our own making and he is certainly not a god designed to win popularity contests.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

129. “All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

130. “Mercy, GOD, mercy!”: the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

131. “Impersonal things that dominate our time and imagination offer extravagant promises of control and knowledge. But they also squeeze all sense of mystery and wonder and reverence out of our lives.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

132. “Apart from the before, the now has little meaning. The now is only a thin slice of who I am; isolated from the rich deposits of before, it cannot be understood.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

133. “Action without prayer thins out into something very exterior. A prayerless life can result in effective action and accomplish magnificent things, but if there is no developed interiority, the action never enters into the depth and intimacy of relationships.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

134. “That is Jeremiah’s accusation: “You have found a safe place, haven’t you! This nice, clean temple. You spend all week out in the world doing what you want to do, taking advantage of others, exploiting the weak, cursing the person who isn’t pliable to your plans, and then you repair to this place where everything is in order and protected and right.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

135. “The church is never in so much danger as when it is popular and millions of people are saying “I’m born again, born again, born again.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

136. “Maturity cannot be hurried, programmed, or tinkered with. There are no steroids available for growing up in Christ more quickly. Impatient shortcuts land us in the dead ends of immaturity.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

137. “Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God-it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship-it deepens.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

138. “I want to develop discernments that say an unapologetic “no” to ways that violate the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

139. “Self is the soul minus God.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

140. “We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

141. “Soul” is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. “Soul” carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

142. “Prayer is a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

143. “Holy ground is dangerous ground.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

144. “Priest and wise man and prophet alike felt that their professional well-being was threatened by Jeremiah’s singularity. Panicked, they plotted his disgrace. Their “law” and “counsel” and “words” were in danger of being exposed as pious frauds by Jeremiah’s honest and passionate life.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

145. “Thomas Merton wrote, “it is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not ‘what he ought to be.’ If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we will do away with him altogether.”50.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

146. “Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests.“1.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

147. “Spirituality is no different from what weve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. Its just ordinary stuff.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

148. “I have no interest in eliminating the tension between justice and forgiveness by taking justice off the table. Given the subtleties of sin and the persistence of evil, we would soon be living in moral anarchy and political chaos if there were no provision for justice.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

149. “Every day I review the ways he works, I try not to miss a trick. I feel put back together, and I’m watching my step. GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

150. “Our beloved country is being attacked and we must be loyal to it; in times of crisis it is not right to criticize your leaders. It is disloyal, an act of treachery.” Using jingoist language is far easier than taking responsibility for righteousness in the nation. Far easier to shout patriotic slogans than to work patriotically for justice.”

— Eugene H. Peterson