Top 250 Rob Bell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Agape doesn’t love somebody because they’re worthy. Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love. Agape doesn’t love somebody because they’re beautiful. Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful.”

— Rob Bell

2. “Your ikigai is a work in progress because you are a work in progress. Knowing your ikigai, then, takes patience and insight, and courage, and honesty.”

— Rob Bell

3. “That breath that you just took, that’s a gift!”

— Rob Bell

4. “The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.”

— Rob Bell

5. “On the Sabbath- we are reminded that we are not human doings, but human beings.”

— Rob Bell

6. “When you forgive somebody, when you are generous, when you withhold judgment, when you love and when you stand up to injustice, you are, in that moment, bringing heaven to earth.”

— Rob Bell

7. “Because with every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth.”

— Rob Bell

8. “Two of the most powerful words you can hear someone say are ‘me too.’”

— Rob Bell

9. “I believe that God is love. I believe that Jesus came to show us this love, to give us this love, to teach us about this love, so that we could live in this love and extend it to others.”

— Rob Bell

10. “The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, Me too.”

— Rob Bell

11. “Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two – love and controlling power over the other person – are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.”

— Rob Bell

Featured in: Romance Quotes

12. “This breath, and this moment, and this life is a gift and we are all in this together. We all have countless choices every day to close down or stand up straight and open up, and take a big breath and say YES to the gift.”

— Rob Bell

13. “No one has the last word other than God.”

— Rob Bell

14. “Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn’t as bright as it could be.”

— Rob Bell

15. “The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.”

— Rob Bell

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “What we do comes out of who we believe we are.”

— Rob Bell

17. “If your faith is threatened by something that’s true, then it wasn’t much of a faith to begin with, was it?”

— Rob Bell

18. “Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn’t there anymore.”

— Rob Bell

19. “The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can’t be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.”

— Rob Bell

20. “We live in the midst of a creation that is groaning.”

— Rob Bell

21. “The life that you want begins the moment you embrace the life you have because all of it is a miracle.”

— Rob Bell

22. “We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world. This is absolutely crucial.”

— Rob Bell

23. “Creating and sharing beautiful things has provided me with the inspiration that we can do things we never thought we could do and that we will get to see wonderful things we never thought we would see.”

— Rob Bell

24. “Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.”

— Rob Bell

25. “My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.”

— Rob Bell

26. “Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.”

— Rob Bell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

27. “Resurrection is a belief and hope in restoring this world.”

— Rob Bell

28. “Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god, either.”

— Rob Bell

29. “You’re here, you’re breathing, you are the recipient of an extraordinary act of generosity called life.”

— Rob Bell

30. “Jesus is God’s way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.”

— Rob Bell

31. “The best team does not always win, it’s the team that plays the best.”

— Rob Bell

32. “Freedom is not having everything we crave, it’s being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it.”

— Rob Bell

33. “Many of the most significant moments in our lives come not because it all went right but because it all fell apart.”

— Rob Bell

34. “If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody.”

— Rob Bell

35. “I believe our world desperately needs Good News.”

— Rob Bell

36. “Your life is a gift and how you respond to it – what you do with it matters. That’s where I start.”

— Rob Bell

37. “Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.”

— Rob Bell

38. “You can set your intention to better understand your soul, your spirit, through daily practices like prayer, yoga and meditation, etc.”

— Rob Bell

39. “Why have the writings of the prophets endured? Because they fearlessly speak truth to power. They call out the injustice and oppression of the system gone wrong. They hold those in leadership accountable for the decisions they make.”

— Rob Bell

40. “The cross is Gods way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.”

— Rob Bell

41. “You explore the possibilities because you can’t steer a parked car.”

— Rob Bell

42. “A good sermon is going to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. It inspires you. It provokes you. It should make your soul soar.”

— Rob Bell

43. “Well, I affirm orthodox Christian faith. I affirm the Nicene Creed. I don’t think I’m doing anything terribly new.”

— Rob Bell

44. “It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark.”

— Rob Bell

45. “Every generation has to ask difficult questions about what does it mean to follow Jesus.”

— Rob Bell

46. “Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.”

— Rob Bell

47. “What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.”

— Rob Bell

48. “You cannot bring a fresh, new word about human flourishing and expect the old, established systems of oppression and power to stand by passively. Or, as Jesus put it, “You can’t put new wine into old wineskins.”

— Rob Bell

49. “There are moments when we have to return to our roots.”

— Rob Bell

50. “To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God’s love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It’s taking flesh and turning it back into words.”

— Rob Bell