Top 200 John Eldredge Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “When it comes to happiness, our soul is like a colander, a tire with a nail in it, our grandfather’s memory. It feels like there is a homeless person inside of us, wandering around pushing a shopping cart.”

— John Eldredge

102. “He is the playfulness of creation, scandal and utter goodness, the generosity of the ocean and the ferocity of a thunderstorm; he is cunning as a snake and gentle as a whisper; the gladness of sunshine and the humility of a thirty-mile walk by foot on a dirt road.”

— John Eldredge

103. “Grief is a form of validation; it says the wound mattered. It mattered. You mattered. That’s not the way life was supposed to go.”

— John Eldredge

104. “All of the happiness we have ever known and all of the happiness we hope to find is unreachable without a heart.”

— John Eldredge

105. “Who am I really? The answer to that question is found in the answer to another. What is God’s heart toward me, or, how do I affect him? If God is the Pursuer, the Ageless Romancer, the Lover, then there has to be a Beloved, one who is the Pursued. This is our role in the story.”

— John Eldredge

106. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”2.”

— John Eldredge

107. “The real you is on the side of God against the false self. Knowing this makes all the difference in the world. The man who wants to live valiantly will lose heart quickly if he believes that his heart is nothing but sin.”

— John Eldredge

108. “This is the time for a young man to stop saying, “Why is life so hard?” He takes the hardness as the call to fight, to rise up, take it on.”

— John Eldredge

109. “They may be misplaced, forgotten, or misdirected, but in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.”

— John Eldredge

110. “Your feminine heart has been created with the greatest of all possible dignities – as a reflection of God’s own heart.”

— John Eldredge

111. “As D. H. Lawrence said, “I am not a mechanism.”

— John Eldredge

112. “You are radiant this evening. You are absolutely breathtaking.”

— John Eldredge

113. “We reframe everything by one simple choice: I am accepting God’s invitation to become a man. From there we interpret jobs, money, relationships, flat tires, bad dates, even our play time as the context in which the boy is becoming a man. We take an active role, asking our Father to speak to us, speak to our identity, to validate us. We step into our fears and accept “hardship as discipline.”

— John Eldredge

114. “For above all else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart.”

— John Eldredge

115. “You can find that life – if you are willing to embark on a great adventure.”

— John Eldredge

116. “The Lover of our souls, the One who has pursued us down through space and time, who gave his own life to rescue us from the Kingdom of Darkness, has made it clear: He does not want to lose us. He longs for us to be with him forever.”

— John Eldredge

117. “Most messages for men ultimately fail. The reason is simple: they ignore what is deep and true to a man’s heart, his real passions, and simply try to shape him up through various forms of pressure.”

— John Eldredge

118. “Oswald Chambers, a man who wrote profoundly and elegantly on prayer, made a radical statement when he said, “The idea of prayer is not in order to get answers from God.” Good heavens – it’s not? What then is the purpose? “Prayer is perfect and complete oneness with God.” 1 A mighty truth is being uncovered here.”

— John Eldredge

119. “Most Christians have lost the life of their heart and with it, their romance with God.”

— John Eldredge

120. “The first line grabs me by the throat. “Therefore we do not lose heart.” Somebody knows how not to lose heart? I’m all ears. For we are losing heart. All of us. Daily. It is the single most unifying quality shared by the human race on the planet at this time. We are losing – or we have already lost – heart.”

— John Eldredge

121. “And so a man’s heart, driven into the darker regions of the soul, denied the very things he most deeply desires, comes out in darker places.”

— John Eldredge

122. “The spirit of our day is a soft acceptance of everything – except deep conviction in anything.”

— John Eldredge

123. “Our smaller stories are constructed along the plot lines of control and gratification. Once we begin to live by this false self, Satan and his minions sabotage the story to make sure we are exposed. Then he mocks us for our foolishness and hypocrisy for hiding behind such a facade in the first place. Other times, he simply leaves us to die in costume.”

— John Eldredge

124. “A boy wants to attack something – and so does a man, even if it’s only a little white ball on a tee. He wants to whack it into kingdom come.”

— John Eldredge

125. “So, let’s come back to the simple question Jesus asks of us all: What do you want? Don’t minimize it; don’t try to make sure it sounds spiritual; don’t worry about whether or not you can obtain it. Just stay with the question until you begin to get an answer. This is the way we keep current with our hearts.”

— John Eldredge

126. “I renounce every limit I have ever placed on Jesus. I renounce every limit I have placed on him in my life. I break all limitations, renounce them, revoke them. Jesus, forgive me for restraining you in my life.”

— John Eldredge

127. “Jesus, I give my hope to your true and certain return, and the renewal of all things.”

— John Eldredge

128. “Am I really a man? Have I got what it takeswhen it counts?”

— John Eldredge

129. “Salvation is a process, not an event.”

— John Eldredge

130. “You are never a great man when you have more mind than heart. – BEAUCHENE.”

— John Eldredge

131. “When a woman forsakes her vulnerability because she’s been hurt or because she lives in a dangerous world or doesn’t want to be used, she loses something essential about being a woman.”

— John Eldredge

132. “God’s version of flowers and chocolates and candlelight dinners comes in the form of sunsets and falling stars, moonlight on lakes and cricket.”

— John Eldredge

133. “You are the son of a kind, strong, and engaged Father, a Father wise enough to guide you in the Way, generous enough to provide for your journey, offering to walk with you every step. This is perhaps the hardest thing for us to believe – really believe, down deep in our hearts, so that it changes us forever, changes the way we approach each day.”

— John Eldredge

134. “The whole, vast world was incomplete without me. Creation reached its finishing touch in me.”

— John Eldredge

135. “Life is a hypocrite if I can’t live The way it moves me!”

— John Eldredge

136. “Worship is what we give our hearts away to in return for a promise of Life.”

— John Eldredge

137. “Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment’s respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.”

— John Eldredge

138. “First, you’ll discover that God is relational to his core, that he has a heart for romance. Second, that he longs to share adventures with us – adventures you cannot accomplish without him. And finally, that God has a beauty to unveil. A beauty that is captivating and powerfully redemptive.”

— John Eldredge

139. “Here’s the test – if you can’t take your church culture and language and drop it in the middle of a bar or a bus, and have it make winsome sense to the people there, then it’s not from Jesus. Because that is exactly what he could do. That’s what made him the real deal.”

— John Eldredge

140. “A woman who is striving invites others to strive. The message – sometimes implicit in her actions, sometimes explicit through her words – is, “Get your act together. Life is uncertain. There is no time for your heart here. Shape up. Get busy. That’s what is important.” She does not say, “All is well. All shall be well.” Her fear doesn’t allow it. She is withholding the very things her world needs.”

— John Eldredge

141. “The beauty of a woman is first a soulful beauty. And yes, as we live it out, own it, inhabit our beauty, we do become more lovely. More alluring. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “Self flashes off frame and face.” Our true self becomes reflected in our appearance. But it flows from the inside.”

— John Eldredge

142. “Perhaps it is our fear of getting our hopes up; it seems too good to be true. Perhaps it’s been the almost total focus on sin and the Cross. But the Scripture is abundant and clear: Christ came not only to pardon us, but also to heal us. He wants the glory restored. So, put the book down for just a moment, and let this sink in: Jesus can, and wants to, heal your heart.”

— John Eldredge

143. “I daresay we’ve heard a bit about original sin, but not nearly enough about original glory, which comes before sin and is deeper to our nature. We were crowned with glory and honor. Why does a woman long to be beautiful? Why does a man hope to be found brave? Because we remember, if only faintly, that we were once more than we are now.”

— John Eldredge

144. “The greatest human tragedy is to give up the search. Nothing is of greater importance than the life of our deep heart. To lose heart is to lose everything.”

— John Eldredge

145. “They ignore what is deep and true to a man’s heart, his real passions, and simply try to shape him up through various forms of pressure.”

— John Eldredge

146. “You learn a great deal about the true nature of a person in the way they love, why they love, and, in what they love.”

— John Eldredge

147. “In the spacious love of God, our souls can lie down and rest. This love from him is not something we must struggle for, earn, or fear to lose. It is bestowed. He has bestowed it upon us. He has chosen us. And nothing can separate us from his love. Not even we, ourselves. We are made for such a love. Our hearts yearn to be loved intimately, personally, and yes, romantically. We are created to be the object of desire and affection of one who is totally and completely in love with us. And we are.”

— John Eldredge

148. “How wonderful to discover that God has never been alone. He has always been Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God has always been a fellowship. This whole Story began with something relational.”

— John Eldredge

149. “If strangers and strange sights can shake the world of children, it takes the people they know and love best to pull it out from under them like a chair.”

— John Eldredge

150. “A man whose identity flows out of deep validation doesn’t wilt under criticism. He enjoys applause when it comes but frankly isn’t desperate for it. He can walk away from work at five o’clock; he doesn’t measure his success by how much money he makes. We grow into this man, to be sure; I’m not setting a new standard of perfection. But what I am describing.”

— John Eldredge