Top 40 John Powell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Communication works for those who work at it.”

— John Powell

Featured in: Effort Quotes, Work Ethic Quotes, Communication Quotes

2. “It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine.”

— John Powell

3. “Love is not a feeling to be felt, it’s an action to be learned.”

— John Powell

4. “Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection.”

— John Powell

5. “Growth is always a gradual process, a bridge slowly crossed and not a corner sharply turned.”

— John Powell

6. “If you knew me yesterday, please do not think that it is the same person that you are meeting today.”

— John Powell

7. “The real gift of love is self disclosure.”

— John Powell

8. “A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.”

— John Powell

9. “Life is something like a remarkable, exciting puzzle. It comes piece by piece in packages marked days.”

— John Powell

10. “You have a unique message to deliver, a unique song to sing, a unique act of love to bestow. This message, this song, and this act of love have been entrusted exclusively to the one and only you.”

— John Powell

11. “To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.”

— John Powell

12. “The only love worthy of a name is unconditional.”

— John Powell

13. “There’s the whole myth about rocket science. It’s really not that hard. It’s not brain surgery.”

— John Powell

14. “If you knew me in the past, please do not think that I am the same person that you are meeting today. I have experienced more of life, I have encountered new depths in those I love, I have suffered and prayed and I am different.”

— John Powell

15. “Each child is sent into this world by God with a “Unique Message” to deliver, a new personal act of love to bestow.”

— John Powell

16. “Comparison is the death of true self-contentment.”

— John Powell

17. “A good listener truly wants to know the speaker.”

— John Powell

18. “What are the “ifs” and “buts” that limit my enjoyment of life?”

— John Powell

19. “Pain is a teacher from whom we can learn much.”

— John Powell

20. “Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.”

— John Powell

21. “God is to us like the sky to a small bird, which cannot see its outer limits and cannot reach its distant horizons, but can only lose itself in the greatness and immensity of the blueness.”

— John Powell

22. “God alone can make a man a believer. Our part is to accept or reject his initiative.”

— John Powell

23. “Our lives are shaped by those who love us.”

— John Powell

24. “There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.”

— John Powell

25. “I have to be honest in asking myself: Do I really want to know and do God’s will? Or is it rather that I want God to do my will? Do I go to God with the assurance that I want only to know and do his will? Or do I rather first make my own plans and then insist that God make my dreams come true?”

— John Powell

26. “He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.”

— John Powell

27. “Love demands that I learn how to focus my attention on the needs of those I love.”

— John Powell

28. “We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.”

— John Powell

29. “When we contact each other, we change each other. We are constantly making each other.”

— John Powell

30. “Love supposes, is, and does many things, but basically it is practiced in the act of sharing.”

— John Powell

31. “There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won’t feel any pain.”

— John Powell

32. “By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let it go.”

— John Powell

33. “Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.”

— John Powell

34. “To tell you my thoughts is to locate myself in a category. To tell you about my feelings is to tell you about me.”

— John Powell

35. “What is disgraceful and outrageous is that 18,000 children die of hunger every day, every one of them a preventable death. That’s what the controversy should be about.”

— John Powell

36. “You can’t reinvent yourself for every movie.”

— John Powell

37. “We cannot “psychologize” the grace of God. God’s actions are outside and above our human sciences.”

— John Powell

38. “He who has learned how to laugh at himself shall never cease to be entertained.”

— John Powell

39. “Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.”

— John Powell

40. “Attitudes are capable of making the same experience either pleasant or painful.”

— John Powell

41. “Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.”

— John Powell

42. “More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.”

— John Powell