Top 160 Richard J. Foster Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Prayer is – listening for the still small voice of God. Listening with the “ear of our hearts.””

— Richard J. Foster

2. “Our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in “muchness” and “manyness,” he will rest satisfied.”

— Richard J. Foster

3. “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”

— Richard J. Foster

4. “Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.”

— Richard J. Foster

5. “Just as worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship.”

— Richard J. Foster

6. “The discovery of God lies in the daily and the ordinary, not in the spectacular and the heroic. If we cannot find God in the routines of home and shop, then we will not find Him at all.”

— Richard J. Foster

7. “Simplicity is freedom.”

— Richard J. Foster

8. “In intellectual honesty, we should be willing to study and explore the spiritual life with all the rigor and determination we would give to any field of research.”

— Richard J. Foster

9. “Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.”

— Richard J. Foster

10. “The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”

— Richard J. Foster

11. “Worship is our response to the overtures of love from the heart of the Father.”

— Richard J. Foster

12. “Giving with glad and generous hearts has a way of routing out the tough old miser within us. Even the poor need to know that they can give. Just the very act of letting go of money, or some other treasure, does something within us. It destroys the demon greed.”

— Richard J. Foster

13. “If the Lord is to be Lord, worship must have priority in our lives. The divine priority is worship first, service second.”

— Richard J. Foster

14. “Spiritual direction involves a process through which one person helps another person understand what God is doing and saying.”

— Richard J. Foster

15. “May God give you – and me- the courage, the wisdom, the strength always to hold the kingdom of God as the number one priority of our lives. To do so is to live in simplicity.”

— Richard J. Foster

16. “It is Stoicism that demands a closed universe, not the Bible.”

— Richard J. Foster

17. “Today the heart of God is an open wound of love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns that we do not draw near to Him. He grieves that we have forgotten Him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence.”

— Richard J. Foster

18. “Simplicity is the only thing that sufficiently reorients our lives so that possessions can be genuinely enjoyed without destroying us.”

— Richard J. Foster

19. “As worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an opiate, an escape from the pressing needs of modern life.”

— Richard J. Foster

20. “God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us.”

— Richard J. Foster

21. “Inward solitude has outward manifestations. There is the freedom to be alone, not in order to be away from people but in order to hear the divine Whisper better.”

— Richard J. Foster

22. “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.”

— Richard J. Foster

23. “Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. But when praying, we come “underneath,” where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent.”

— Richard J. Foster

24. “If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this leads us to prayer.”

— Richard J. Foster

25. “And so I urge you: carry on an ongoing conversation with God about the daily stuff of life, a little like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. For now, do not worry about “proper” praying, just talk to God.”

— Richard J. Foster

26. “Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.”

— Richard J. Foster

27. “Goals are discovered, not made.”

— Richard J. Foster

28. “Spiritual direction is an interpersonal relationship in which we learn how to grow, live, and love in the spiritual life.”

— Richard J. Foster

29. “Joy, not grit, is the hallmark of holy obedience. We need to be light-hearted in what we do to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. It is a cheerful revolt against self and pride.”

— Richard J. Foster

30. “To listen to others quiets and disciplines the mind to listen to God.”

— Richard J. Foster

31. “There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less. – G. K. Chesterton.”

— Richard J. Foster

32. “Prayer is the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul.”

— Richard J. Foster

33. “He is inviting you – and me – to come home, to come home to where we belong, to come home to that for which we were created. His arms are stretched out wide to receive us. His heart is enlarged to take us in.”

— Richard J. Foster

34. “Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.”

— Richard J. Foster

35. “Stop trying to impress people with your clothes and impress them with your life.”

— Richard J. Foster

36. “The spiritual discipline of simplicity is not a lost dream, but a recurrent version throughout history. It can be recaptured today. It must be.”

— Richard J. Foster

37. “To pray is to change. This is a great grace. How good of God to provide a path whereby our lives can be taken over by love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.”

— Richard J. Foster

38. “Our God is not made of stone. His heart is the most sensitive and tender of all. No act goes unnoticed, no matter how insignificant or small. A cup of cold water is enough to put tears in the eyes of God. God celebrates our feeble expressions of gratitude.”

— Richard J. Foster

39. “When we genuinely believe that inner transformation is God’s work and not ours, we can put to rest our passion to set others straight.”

— Richard J. Foster

40. “Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love.”

— Richard J. Foster

41. “In worship an increased power steals its way into the heart sanctuary, an increased compassion grows in the soul. To worship is to change.”

— Richard J. Foster

42. “Humility, as we all know, is one of those virtues that is never gained by seeking it. The more we pursue it the more distant it becomes. To think we have it is sure evidence that we don’t.”

— Richard J. Foster

43. “Owning things is an obsession in our culture. If we own it, we feel we can control it; and if we control it, we feel it will give us more pleasure. The idea is an illusion.”

— Richard J. Foster

44. “For now, do not worry about “proper” praying, just talk to God. Share your hurts, share your sorrows, share your joys – freely and openly. God listens in compassion and love, just like we do when our children come to us.”

— Richard J. Foster

45. “I said that every Discipline has its corresponding freedom. What freedom corresponds to submission? It is the ability to lay down the terrible burden of always needing to get our own way. The obsession to demand that things go the way we want them to go is one of the greatest bondages in human society today.”

— Richard J. Foster

46. “Worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience.”

— Richard J. Foster

47. “Let’s discipline ourselves so that our words are few and full.”

— Richard J. Foster

48. “Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important.”

— Richard J. Foster

49. “Spiritual Disciplines involve doing what we can do to receive from God the power to do what we cannot.”

— Richard J. Foster

50. “My dearest Lord, be thou a bright flame before me, a guiding star above me, a smooth path beneath me, a kindly shepherd behind me, today and for evermore. – St. Columba of Iona.”

— Richard J. Foster