Top 40 Ian Morgan Cron Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

2. “The Enneagram is a tool that awakens our compassion for people just as they are, not the people we wish they would become so our lives would become easier.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

3. “Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

4. “A peace lover is someone who enjoys the absence of conflict, but a peacemaker is someone who is proactively engaged in works of reconciliation in every sphere of life, from the personal to the global. That.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

5. “There is a law in physics that applies to the soul. No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time; one thing must displace another. If your heart’s crammed tight with material things and a thirst for wealth, there’s no space left for God. Francis wanted a void in his life that could only be filled with Jesus. Poverty wasn’t a burden for him – it was a pathway to spiritual freedom.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

6. “Think of it this way,” he continued. “A pilgrimage is a way of praying with your feet. You go on a pilgrimage because you know there’s something missing inside your soul, and the only way you can find it is to go to sacred places, places where God made himself known to others. In sacred places, something gets done to you that you’ve been unable to do for yourself.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

7. “Stop fantasizing about the ideal relationship, career or community and getting stuck in longing for it. Instead, work hard for what’s possible and see it through to completion. Don’t look for beauty and meaning only in the extraordinary or unusual but in the ordinary and simple as well. When the past calls, let it go to voicemail. It has nothing new to say to you. Don’t embellish and get swept up in your feelings. In the words of Jack Kornfield, “No emotion is final.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

8. “Thomas Merton wrote, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

9. “Information is not transformation.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

10. “Buried in the deepest precincts of being I sense there’s a truer, more luminous expression of myself, and that as long as I remain estranged from it I will never feel fully alive or whole.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

11. “What if, now and then, we put the drums and guitars away, turned off the projectors, shut down the sound system, and waited quietly for God to emerge from the woods? Do we have enough faith to believe he’d appear to us as a community?”

— Ian Morgan Cron

12. “Don’t try to change people. Love them. Only in acceptance can people embrace healthy transformation.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

13. “We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty, but also in its great and very simple dignity: created to be the child of God, and capable of loving with something of God’s own sincerity and his unselfishness.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

14. “Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

15. “When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change,” he says. “But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

16. “It’s like what Gandhi said: “The world is so hungry for God that God could only come as a piece of bread. We so long for joy that God even risked coming into the world in the form of intoxication, that risky thing called wine.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

17. “How, as John Calvin put it, “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” “For.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

18. “Atticus tells her, “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

19. “Most people don’t ever anticipate that a sudden change in cabin pressure might occur in their home, triggering the hope that an oxygen mask would fall from somewhere overhead to replace the air that shock has just sucked out of their lungs.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

20. “Sadly, the unlived lives of parents sometimes push their children toward destinies not of their own choosing.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

21. “The good news is we have a God who would know our scrawny butt anywhere. He remembers who we are, the person he knit together in our mother’s womb, and he wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

22. “Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

23. “I’m beginning to see that there’s a difference between art that trusts beauty’s simple power to point people to God and Christian art that’s consciously propagandistic. My Uncle Kenny, with whom I spent most of my time in Italy, said something profound – that you can make art about the Light, or you can make art that shows what the Light reveals about the world.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

24. “Either way, always maintain a compassionate stance toward yourself as God does. Self-contempt will never produce lasting, healing change in our lives, only love.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

25. “Whenever possible, perform acts of anonymous service.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

26. “Neuroscientists have determined the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with decision making and cost-benefit assessments. If MRI brain scans had been performed on my friends and me one summer’s night when we were fifteen, they would have revealed a dark spot indicating a complete absence of activity in this region of our brains.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

27. “But there is an old Rwandan proverb: ‘He who seeks vengeance is like a man who drinks poison, hoping that it will kill his enemy,’ ” Emmanuel said, a fleeting smile appearing.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

28. “Anyone who says they’re “trying” to be a good Christian right away reveals they have no idea what a Christian is. Christianity is not something you do as much as something that gets done to you. Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

29. “Risking vulnerability and love is what takes courage.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

30. “Now I see the Story more like a painting filled with glory, poetry, and even blurry lines.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

31. “His will to live was waning, and it made him almost transparent, as though rather than dying, he might just disappear one day, leaving behind only a vague scent of regret.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

32. “I love a lot of people, understand none of them.” Flannery O’Connor.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

33. “I struggled to find words to explain why I’d lost my composure, but as I was about to speak, Thomas squeezed my hand. “Not to worry; sometimes prayers are wet,” he said.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

34. “Father Alexander Schmemann is an Orthodox scholar who wrote a book called For the Life of the World. He says the liturgy is a journey that proceeds from the kingdom of this world into a brief encounter with the kingdom of God, and then back out again to bear witness to it.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

35. “We don’t know ourselves by what we get right; we know ourselves by what we get wrong.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

36. “Loyal to a fault, Sixes mean it when they say, “Until death do us part.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

37. “Sixes make terrific friends or partners when they’re spiritually healthy and growing in self-knowledge. Loyal to a fault, Sixes mean it when they say, “Until death do us part.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

38. “Every business needs a loyal skeptic who isn’t afraid to ask hard questions or point out the flaws in a plan. A room full of overcaffeinated, risk-tolerant entrepreneurs may not like it when a Six asks a question that pops the balloon on their big idea, but someone has to be the voice of anxiety!”

— Ian Morgan Cron

39. “Life hands us a challenging syllabus. We need all the help we can get.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

40. “Because Sixes are conscientious, they tend to take on too much work, which leaves them feeling stressed out, resentful and pessimistic. When it all becomes too overwhelming they can overreact, which can ripple out and freak out other people.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

41. “To know oneself is, above all, to know.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

42. “Sixes are sharp, analytically minded troubleshooters. They love being on the underdog team trying to resurrect a company or failing program, particularly when others say it can’t be done.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

43. “Ones’ passion to improve the world goes bad when they start to believe that in order to be loved they have to be perfect and not make mistakes.”

— Ian Morgan Cron