Top 50 Gregory Boyle Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

— Gregory Boyle

2. “Behold the One beholding you and smiling.” It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God’s DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment.”

— Gregory Boyle

3. “See how they love one another.” Not a bad gauge of health. “There was no needy person among them.” A better metric would be hard to find. There is one line that stopped me in my tracks: “And awe came upon everyone.” It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.”

— Gregory Boyle

4. “God was – and is – in the heartbreak and in the insight born of sadness, and in the arms that wrap around our grief.”

— Gregory Boyle

5. “The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be some lives out there that matter less than other lives.”

— Gregory Boyle

6. “Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified – whichever came first.”

— Gregory Boyle

7. “You are exactly what God had in mind when He made you.”

— Gregory Boyle

8. “Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range.”

— Gregory Boyle

9. “Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin.”

— Gregory Boyle

10. “Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, “I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you’re talking to, the one right in front of you.”

— Gregory Boyle

11. “It is certainly true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a book by its first chapter – even if that chapter is twenty years long.”

— Gregory Boyle

12. “Moral outrage is the opposite of God; it only divides and separates what God wants for us, which is to be united in kinship. Moral outrage doesn’t lead us to solutions – it keeps us from them. It keeps us from moving forward toward a fuller, more compassionate response to members of our community who belong to us, no matter what they’ve done.”

— Gregory Boyle

13. “What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?”

— Gregory Boyle

14. “We are put on earth for a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”

— Gregory Boyle

15. “The poet Rumi writes, ‘Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you – cheek to cheek.”

— Gregory Boyle

16. “Oscar Romero wrote: “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed – what gospel is that?”

— Gregory Boyle

17. “But the work one does seeks to align our lives with God’s longing for us – that we be happy, joyful, and liberated from all that prevents us from seeing ourselves as God does.”

— Gregory Boyle

18. “Ours is a God who waits. Who are we not to? It takes what it takes for the great turnaround. Wait for it.”

— Gregory Boyle

19. “Mother Teresa’s take: “We are not called to be successful, but faithful.”

— Gregory Boyle

20. “Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at.”

— Gregory Boyle

21. “If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.”

— Gregory Boyle

22. “Humility returns the center of gravity to the center. It addresses the ego clinging, which supplies oxygen to our suffering. It calls for a light grasp. For the opposite of clinging is not letting go but cherishing. This is the goal of the practice of humility. That having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.”

— Gregory Boyle

23. “Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I’m not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.”

— Gregory Boyle

24. “Living the gospel, then, is less about “thinking outside the box” than about choosing to live in this ever-widening circle of inclusion.”

— Gregory Boyle

25. “Close both eyes; see with the other one. Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves, quite unexpectedly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love. We’ve wandered into God’s own.”

— Gregory Boyle

26. “Thomas Wolfe, in You Can’t Go Home Again, writes, “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.”

— Gregory Boyle

27. “With That Moon Language Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.” Of course you do not do this out loud; Otherwise, Someone would call the cops. Still though, think about this, This great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one Who lives with a full moon in each eye That is always saying With that sweet moon Language What every other eye in this world Is dying to Hear.”

— Gregory Boyle

28. “They say that an educated inmate will not reoffend. This is not because an education assures that this guy will get hired somewhere. It is because his view is larger and more educated, so that he can be rejected at ninety-three job interviews and still not give up. He’s acquired resilience.”

— Gregory Boyle

29. “The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now.”

— Gregory Boyle

30. “Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel.”

— Gregory Boyle

31. “Salivating for success keeps you from being faithful, keeps you from truly seeing whoever’s sitting in front of you. Embracing a strategy and an approach you can believe in is sometimes the best you can do on any given day. If you surrender your need for results and outcomes, success becomes God’s business.”

— Gregory Boyle

32. “The Ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra. And the word wasn’t “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.” The word was “Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.”

— Gregory Boyle

33. “This way will not pass again, and so there is a duty to be mindful of that which delights and keeps joy at the center, distilled from all that happens to us in a day.”

— Gregory Boyle

34. “How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?”

— Gregory Boyle

35. “Guilt, of course, is feeling bad about one’s actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself.”

— Gregory Boyle

36. “You actually abolish slavery by accompanying the slave. We don’t strategize our way out of slavery, we solidarize, if you will, our way toward its demise. We stand in solidarity with the slave, and by doing so, we diminish slavery’s ability to stand.”

— Gregory Boyle

37. “We settle for the look of holiness rather than the likes of it.”

— Gregory Boyle

38. “This is a chapter on God, I guess. Truth be told, the whole book is. Not much in my life makes any sense outside of God. Certainly, a place like Homeboy Industries is all folly and bad business unless the core of the endeavor seeks to imitate the kind of God one ought to believe in. In the end, I am helpless to explain why anyone would accompany those on the margins were it not for some anchored belief that the Ground of all Being thought this was a good idea.”

— Gregory Boyle

39. “After all, nothing depends on how things turn out – only on how you see them when they happen.”

— Gregory Boyle

40. “Everyone is just looking to be told that who he or she is is right and true and wholly acceptable. No need to tinker and tweak. Exactly right.”

— Gregory Boyle

41. “Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel. It sniffs out hypocrisy everywhere and knows when Christians aren’t taking seriously, what Jesus took seriously. It is, by and large, hostile to the right things. It actually longs to embrace the gospel of inclusion and nonviolence, of compassionate love and acceptance. Even atheists cherish such a prospect.”

— Gregory Boyle

42. “Part of the spirit dies a little each time its asked to carry more than its weight in terror, violence, and betrayal.”

— Gregory Boyle

43. “But I know, with all the certainty of my being, that Jesus has no interest in my doing this. To just say, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I’m your biggest fan,” causes him to stare at his watch, tap his feet, and order a double Glenlivet on the rocks with a twist. Fandom is of no interest to Jesus. What matters to him is the authentic following of a disciple. We all settle for saying, “Jesus,” but Jesus wants us to be in the world who he is.”

— Gregory Boyle

44. “Generosity in Buddhism is to be relieved of the “stain of stinginess.”

— Gregory Boyle

45. “Moral outrage is the opposite of God;.”

— Gregory Boyle

46. “Sometimes, it only seems that the hurt wins.”

— Gregory Boyle

47. “It’s when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart. – Denise Levertov.”

— Gregory Boyle

48. “Our sense of God always beckons us us to grow, to reimagine something wildly more breathtaking than where our imagination generally takes us.”

— Gregory Boyle

49. “Now is always vast and new. Like any practice, it’s not about technique or program. It’s a decision.”

— Gregory Boyle

50. “Personally, I don’t think he wants so much for us to wave palm fronds at his authority, but rather to locate our own – to be not so astonished at Jesus’s authority but to live astonishingly, inhabiting our own power to live as he would.”

— Gregory Boyle