Top 250 Rob Bell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We need to return to the simplicity that God is love.”

— Rob Bell

52. “Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.”

— Rob Bell

53. “The resurrection confronts our world with wonder, mystery, and miracles.”

— Rob Bell

54. “I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God’s and everything in it...”

— Rob Bell

55. “One truth is that suffering raises profound questions with the universe. The other truth is that grace, gift and generosity also raise profound questions.”

— Rob Bell

56. “When we get to what happens when we die, we don’t have any video footage. So let’s at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are.”

— Rob Bell

57. “At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.”

— Rob Bell

58. “The world is desperately in need of people who will break themselves open and pour themselves out for the reconciliation of all things- that’s what the world needs.”

— Rob Bell

59. “When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.”

— Rob Bell

60. “What we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like.”

— Rob Bell

61. “What’s interesting is, if you take the scientists and the theologians, the really good ones, they end up both filled with this wide-eyed sense of wonder and awe about look at this world we live in.”

— Rob Bell

62. “It is better to be fully present and rested and engaged for one thing than rushed, distracted, and scattered for ten.”

— Rob Bell

63. “Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.”

— Rob Bell

64. “For many, ‘desire’ is a bad word, something we’re supposed to ‘give up for God.’ That kind of thinking can be really destructive because it teaches people to deny their hearts, their true selves.”

— Rob Bell

65. “The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we’ll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.”

— Rob Bell

66. “Be honest about your joy.”

— Rob Bell

67. “Jesus doesn’t divide the world up into the common and the sacred; he gives us eyes to see the sacred in the common.”

— Rob Bell

68. “Find your rituals, develop your routines, create those practices that ground and center you. Stick to them, don’t apologize for them, treat them, even the small things, like they’re big things.”

— Rob Bell

69. “Far too often, we don’t start because we can’t get our minds around the entire thing. We don’t take the first step because we can’t figure out the seventeenth step. But you don’t have to know the seventeenth step. You only have to know the first step. Because the first number is always 1. Start with 1.”

— Rob Bell

70. “The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn’t that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.”

— Rob Bell

71. “But it isn’t a choice, because Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” If you come across truth in any form, it isn’t outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Christian is to claim truth wherever you find it.”

— Rob Bell

72. “I like to say that I practice militant mysticism. I’m really absolutely sure of some things that I don’t quite know.”

— Rob Bell

73. “The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour’s need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.”

— Rob Bell

74. “Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.”

— Rob Bell

75. “Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves – that we are here.”

— Rob Bell

76. “We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.”

— Rob Bell

77. “It often takes suffering and lost in order to remind us of how precious life is.”

— Rob Bell

78. “When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.”

— Rob Bell

79. “The joy is in the creation. So I’ve never had a target audience, it’s always been about being true to the work as it emerges.”

— Rob Bell

80. “Holism is when two plus two equals infinity.”

— Rob Bell

81. “But it’s in that disappointment, in that confusion, in that pain – the pain that comes from things not going how I wanted them to – that I find the same thing happening, again and again. I come to the end of myself, to the end of my power, the end of my strength, the end of my understanding, only to find, in that place of powerlessness, a strength and peace that weren’t there before.”

— Rob Bell

82. “Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God’s ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.”

— Rob Bell

83. “It’s the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that’s jammed on “repeat,” these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren’t clear and focused and grounded.”

— Rob Bell

84. “Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don’t have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.”

— Rob Bell

85. “Fear wants us to become obsessed with some event or person in the future, a year, a month, even a day. It also wants us to look backwards not at our successes, but our short-comings and our failures. Fear losses it’s grip when we stay in the now.”

— Rob Bell

86. “Look at the size of the universe and look at what we’re discovering about string theory. There’s a wide-eyed sense of we’re just getting started here.”

— Rob Bell

87. “Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.”

— Rob Bell

88. “When the female voice is repressed and stifled, the entire community can easily find themselves cut off from the sacred feminine, depriving themselves of the full image of god.”

— Rob Bell

89. “We embrace truth wherever we find it from whoever says it however we come across it. It’s a big beautiful exotic heartbreaking mysterious world we live in and it’s our home and we get to explore and learn and affirm truth wherever we find it.”

— Rob Bell

90. “Jesus did not use hell to try and compel “heathens” and “pagans” to believe in God, so they wouldn’t burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences of straying from their God-given calling and identity to show the world God’s love.”

— Rob Bell

91. “People aren’t static; they’re dynamic – endlessly complex and capable of tremendous surprise and change.”

— Rob Bell

92. “God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.”

— Rob Bell

93. “We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.”

— Rob Bell

94. “God is bigger than the Christian faith.”

— Rob Bell

95. “Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.”

— Rob Bell

96. “If you feel stuck in your life, like it’s passing you by, like there’s something way better for you somewhere out there and you’re missing it, try this – try throwing yourself into the small things and repeating to yourself: This is where I start.”

— Rob Bell

97. “Central to this conquest of the world was the belief that military victory is peace. There was even one line from the empire propaganda that went Caesar is the son of God sent to earth to bring about a universal reign of peace and prosperity. You see the problem here, right? It’s only peace if you’re holding the sword; to all those who were conquered by this devastating war machine – and hung on crosses – it wasn’t peace. It was awful. It was oppressive. It was evil.”

— Rob Bell

98. “Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it.”

— Rob Bell

99. “I actually think there is hell because we see hell every day.”

— Rob Bell

100. “And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire – God says yes. Yes, there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That’s how love works. It can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.”

— Rob Bell