Top 70 N.D. Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The truth is that a life well lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.”

— N.D. Wilson

2. “Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain – they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter.”

— N.D. Wilson

3. “Life is a story. Why do we die? Because we live. Why do we live? Because our Maker opened His mouth and began to tell a story.”

— N.D. Wilson

4. “Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.”

— N.D. Wilson

5. “Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter.”

— N.D. Wilson

6. “God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child’s smile, of dust motes in the sun.”

— N.D. Wilson

7. “Man is born to trouble. Man is born for trouble. Man is born to battle trouble. Man is born for the fight, to be forged and molded – under torch and hammer and chisel – into a sharper, finer, stronger image of God.”

— N.D. Wilson

8. “Do not fear the shadowy places. You will never be the first one there. Another went ahead and down until He came out the other side.”

— N.D. Wilson

9. “Love burns hotter than justice, and its roar is thunder. Beside love, even wrath whispers.”

— N.D. Wilson

10. “Living is the same thing as dying. Living well is the same thing as dying for others.”

— N.D. Wilson

11. “Horace smiled. “Always breakfast like a man condemned. One never knows that a day may bring.””

— N.D. Wilson

12. “The moon was up, painting the world silver, making things look just a little more alive.”

— N.D. Wilson

13. “Self-loathing and self-worship can easily be the same thing. You hate the small sack of fluids and resentments that you are, and you would go to any length, and betray anything and anyone, to preserve it.”

— N.D. Wilson

14. “Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.”

— N.D. Wilson

15. “It is hard to stay focused with so much swirling around me. God is distracting. He never stops talking, and I can never stop listening. There is a reason we sleep.”

— N.D. Wilson

16. “May my living be grace to those behind me.”

— N.D. Wilson

17. “Columbus was the first to come to the east. Vikings don’t count, and neither do all the people who were standing on the beaches and waving when he got here.”

— N.D. Wilson

18. “Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it.”

— N.D. Wilson

19. “Cowards live for the sake of living, but for heroes, life is a weapon, a thing to be spent, a gift to be given to the weak and the lost and the weary, even to the foolish and the cowardly.”

— N.D. Wilson

20. “Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.”

— N.D. Wilson

21. “The world is R-rated, and no one’s checking IDs.”

— N.D. Wilson

22. “Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.”

— N.D. Wilson

23. “Do you dislike your role in the story, your place in the shadow? What complaints do you have that the hobbits could not have heaved at Tolkien? You have been born into a narrative, you have been given freedom. Act, and act well until you reach your final scene.”

— N.D. Wilson

24. “In this story, the sun moves. In this story, every night meets a dawn and burns away in the bright morning. In this story, Winter can never hold back the Spring... He is the best of all possible audiences, the only Audience to see every scene, the Author who became a Character and heaped every shadow on Himself. The Greeks were right. Live in fear of a grinding end and a dank hereafter. Unless you know a bigger God, or better yet, are related to Him by blood.”

— N.D. Wilson

25. “No place is ever the same tomorrow.”

— N.D. Wilson

26. “Spring is worth the wait. Life is worth the death.”

— N.D. Wilson

27. “What I say is, don’t go playing unless you can win. Only sit down to chess with idiots, only kick a dog what’s dead already, and don’t love a lady unless she loves you first.”

— N.D. Wilson

28. “We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms.”

— N.D. Wilson

29. “Caves and darkness can’t hold you when you die, they can only hold your bones.”

— N.D. Wilson

30. “Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shenikah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag.”

— N.D. Wilson

31. “That wasn’t me. I’m not a morning person. There’s another person inside of me that does all the morning things.”

— N.D. Wilson

32. “Here Spring just grows and greens and warms, spreading life, wrapping us in her arms, until suddenly we realize that she’s not a girl anymore. She’s a woman. A woman named Summer.”

— N.D. Wilson

33. “Truth: We are the present. We are now. We are the razor’s edge of history. The future flies at us and from that dark blur we shape the past. And the past is forever.”

— N.D. Wilson

34. “In the Darwinian world, self-preservation is the ultimate shiny good.”

— N.D. Wilson

35. “God’s big enough that small doesn’t matter.”

— N.D. Wilson

36. “He walked down the path of villains, but he became a hero in the end. He has the timepieces, and they have touched his soul forever. He must learn to walk in the darkness between times and wield power without rage.”

— N.D. Wilson

37. “But God never seems capable of moderation.”

— N.D. Wilson

38. “Your father died for me, and dying with you would be an honor, though not as great as dying to save you.”

— N.D. Wilson

39. “That much life is heavy for the strongest shoulders.”

— N.D. Wilson

40. “The fall of man did not introduce evil; it placed us on the wrong side of it, under its rule, needing rescue.”

— N.D. Wilson

41. “The clear water rippled gently, licking the line of fresh blue tile around its rim like a liquid puppy waiting to be played with.”

— N.D. Wilson

42. “But if that was going to happen, it was going to happen whether or not he worried about it.”

— N.D. Wilson

43. “Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anaesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.”

— N.D. Wilson

44. “Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb. You should look under the bed.”

— N.D. Wilson

45. “You can’t buy history new.”

— N.D. Wilson

46. “Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars. You stand in history with stories stretching out both behind and before. We.”

— N.D. Wilson

47. “Stealing ideas from contemporaries is rude and tasteless. Stealing from the long dead is considered literary and admirable. The same is true of grave-robbing. Loot your local cemetery and find yourself mired in social awkwardness. But unearth the tomb of an ancient king and you can feel free to pop off his toe rings. You’ll probably end up on a book tour, or bagging an honorary degree or two.”

— N.D. Wilson

48. “Narrative living is the beginning of rhetoric.”

— N.D. Wilson

49. “Affectation is really a question of heart motive. Growing into a persona is an essential part of maturing. Anything you might choose to do is going to contribute to one persona or another. People will only call attention to it if it is markedly different from the course you were apparently on before.”

— N.D. Wilson

50. “Writing every day is very, very helpful, but set the bar at a place where you have no excuse: It doesn’t matter how tired you are, how late it is, you will do it. So if you say, “I will write one hundred words a day” – set the bar there, and then you can actually get over that bar.”

— N.D. Wilson