Top 250 Rob Bell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I do a meet and greet after every show in which I tell the audience that I would love to thank every single one of them for coming. Which a lot of people take me up on! So I get to meet hundreds and hundreds of people every night, night after night.”

— Rob Bell

102. “The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.”

— Rob Bell

103. “The Bible is not an argument. It is a record of human experience. The point is not to prove that it’s the word of God or it’s inspired or it’s whatever the current word is that people are using. The point is to enter into its stories with such intention and vitality that you find what it is that inspired people to write these books.”

— Rob Bell

104. “Many people need a new rewiring of their heart and mind.”

— Rob Bell

105. “We’re rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion, as a way of life.”

— Rob Bell

106. “An image of God doesn’t contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn’t God; it only points to God.”

— Rob Bell

107. “The hardness of the human heart makes no sense.”

— Rob Bell

108. “I’m interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.”

— Rob Bell

109. “It’s important to embrace several truths about yourself and those around you, beginning with this one: who you AREN’T isn’t interesting.”

— Rob Bell

110. “It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.”

— Rob Bell

111. “When you are bored, restless, longing for something more, unfulfilled, feeling like you’ve settled, haunted by the sense of being trapped in your own life, these are the deep waters of your soul speaking to you, telling you something is wrong, something is missing, something needs to change.”

— Rob Bell

112. “This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don’t do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing?”

— Rob Bell

113. “For many people, God is primitive, behind, trying to drag everything back to some prehistoric era as opposed to spirit, force, love, drawing us into a better future, which to me is – that story has done something in me and I’ve seen it do things in other people.”

— Rob Bell

114. “There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.”

— Rob Bell

115. “We often rush through the experiences that have the greatest shift.”

— Rob Bell

116. “That may sound a big vague, but what has struck me in city after city is that despite our differences and diversity, there’s a common humanity we all share. In many ways we’re all searching and longing for the same things...”

— Rob Bell

117. “The Psalms show us what healthy spiritual life looks like. You name everything that’s happening inside of you. You give it language and expression, You articulate exactly what the desolation feels like. If you don’t drag it up and give it words, then it’s buried down in your being somewhere. And it will come out in other ways. Unhealthy, destructive ways. You’ll keep it bottled up. And you’ll be miserable.”

— Rob Bell

118. “Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.”

— Rob Bell

119. “God doesn’t wait for us to get ourselves polished, shined, proper, and without blemish – God comes to us and meets us and blesses us while we are still in the middle of the mess we created.”

— Rob Bell

120. “This participation is important, because Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways.”

— Rob Bell

121. “To make the cross of Jesus just about human salvation is to miss that God is interested in the saving of everything. Every star and rock and bird. All things.”

— Rob Bell

122. “There are always two risks: the risk of trying something new, and the risk of not trying. You risk settling and continuing in the same way, wondering about other paths and possibilities, believing that this is as good as it gets while discontent gnaws away at your soul.”

— Rob Bell

123. “Swords appear strong, but they’re actually quite weak. Jesus appears weak, but he’s actually quite strong.”

— Rob Bell

124. “Many in the modern world fell for the myth that we’re living in a static, fixed, flat reality of just material things.”

— Rob Bell

125. “I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it’s a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.”

— Rob Bell

126. “Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new.”

— Rob Bell

127. “You just took a breath. You’re about to take another. Inhale, then exhale, then another inhale. In and out. There’s a rhythm to your breathing. It’s the same with nature.”

— Rob Bell

128. “We rob ourselves of immeasurable joy when we compare what we do know about ourselves with what we don’t know about someone else.”

— Rob Bell

129. “Great marriages have an ease about them, a back-and-forth nonreactive, nondefensive, open, and ongoing flow in which you never stop talking and figuring it out together.”

— Rob Bell

130. “I feel like I’ve gotten an extraordinary opportunity to experience a sort of collective humanity. If you hug many people in such a short period of days you pick up on a communal energy, almost like feeling a giant heartbeat that everyone is beating together.”

— Rob Bell

131. “This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.”

— Rob Bell

132. “When you create space for another to thrive, it always unleashes new energies.”

— Rob Bell

133. “The lesson that has been hardest for me to learn: there is nothing to prove.”

— Rob Bell

134. “I believe God gives people the right to say no, to resist, to refuse, to reject, to cling to their sins, to cling to their version of their story.”

— Rob Bell

135. “We all want to make a difference, to live in peace, to have joy each morning that we get to live this day and see what it brings.”

— Rob Bell

136. “It’s absolutely crucial that we come face to face with the power of our choices.”

— Rob Bell

137. “If anybody didn’t have a messiah complex, it was Jesus.”

— Rob Bell

138. “That’s why the Bible is not a book about going to heaven. The action is here. The life is here. The point is here. It’s a library of books about the healing and restoring and reconciling and renewing of this world. Our home.”

— Rob Bell

139. “I embrace the term ‘evangelical,’ if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That’s a beautiful sort of thing.”

— Rob Bell

140. “Grace is when you know you’re loved exactly as you are.”

— Rob Bell

141. “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

142. “Something is profoundly wrong and we are desperate for justice, for restoration and for somebody somewhere to do something about this.”

— Rob Bell

143. “If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.”

— Rob Bell

144. “Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody’s human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we’re living in, and everybody’s living according to a story.”

— Rob Bell

145. “Better to have a stomach full of butterflies than to feel like your life is passing you by.”

— Rob Bell

146. “I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.”

— Rob Bell

147. “There’s way too much wonder and mystery all around us to not stay open to more that’s going on here. You can wake up, and sense and feel and taste and hear a whole world right here within this one, right here in this breath you’re about to take.”

— Rob Bell

148. “The failure to understand the infinite depth of the human soul is often why people who are married have affairs. They stop exploring the person they married. They find somebody who appears more interesting.”

— Rob Bell

149. “Because sometimes you need a biologist, and sometimes you need a poet. Sometimes you need a scientist, and sometimes you need a song.”

— Rob Bell

150. “God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.”

— Rob Bell