Top 180 Shauna Niequist Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.”

— Shauna Niequist

2. “It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”

— Shauna Niequist

3. “When things fall apart, the broken pieces allow all sorts of things to enter, and one of them is the presence of God.”

— Shauna Niequist

4. “My life is a story about who God is and what He does in a human heart.”

— Shauna Niequist

5. “There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.”

— Shauna Niequist

6. “There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.”

— Shauna Niequist

7. “Nothing good comes easily. You have to lose things you thought you loved, give up things you thought you needed. You have to get over yourself, beyond your past, out from under the weight of your future. The good stuff never comes when things are easy. It comes just when you think it never will.”

— Shauna Niequist

8. “What people are craving isn’t perfection. People aren’t longing to be impressed; they’re longing to feel like they’re home. If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they’ll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd.”

— Shauna Niequist

9. “Thank you, God, for the things you heal, the things you redeem, the things you refuse to leave just as they have been for what seems like forever.”

— Shauna Niequist

10. “We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.”

— Shauna Niequist

11. “Bless them. But don’t spend too much time with them. Draw close to people who honor your no, who cheer you on for telling the truth, who value your growth more than they value their own needs getting met or their own pathologies celebrated. Our.”

— Shauna Niequist

12. “I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything’s easy. I believe that loss and emptiness and confusion often give way to new fullness and wisdom.”

— Shauna Niequist

13. “Life sneaks up on us every once in a while and gives us something we didn’t ever know we wanted, and lights within us a love we didn’t even know existed.”

— Shauna Niequist

14. “Just because you have the capacity to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it.”

— Shauna Niequist

15. “I used to think that the ability to turn back time would be the greatest possible gift, so that I could undo all the things I wish I hadn’t done. But grace is an even better gift, because it allows me to do more than just erase; it allows me to become more than I was when I did those things. It’s forgiveness without forgetting, which is much sweeter than amnesia.”

— Shauna Niequist

16. “Present is living with your feet firmly grounded in reality, pale and uncertain as it may seem. Present is choosing to believe that your own life is worth investing deeply in, instead of waiting for some rare miracle or fairytale. Present means we understand that the here and now is sacred, sacramental, threaded through with divinity even in its plainness. Especially in its plainness.”

— Shauna Niequist

17. “God gives us something amazing when he gives us life, and I want to live with gratitude. I want to live in a way that shows how much I appreciate the gift.”

— Shauna Niequist

18. “We have, each one of us, been entrusted with one life, made up of days and hours and minutes. We’re spending them according to our values, whether or not we admit it.”

— Shauna Niequist

19. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and realize that the best thing about me was I was organized. That I executed well, that I ran a tight ship, that I never missed a detail.”

— Shauna Niequist

20. “It’s rebellious, in a way, to choose joy, to dance, to love your life. It’s much easier and much more common to be miserable. We could just live our normal, day-to-day lives, saving all the good living up for someday, but I think it’s our job to live each day like it’s a special occasion, because we’ve been given a gift.”

— Shauna Niequist

21. “Marriage isn’t a business, co-owned and managed. It’s a love story. The most important things we can give our marriage are time and romance, kissing and laughing. Laundry can wait, but a love story needs to be written a little bit every day. WHEN.”

— Shauna Niequist

22. “This is hospitality at its core. This is the beat of my heart: to experience grace and nourishment, and to offer it, one in each hand, to every person I meet – grace and nourishment. You can rest. You don’t have to starve.”

— Shauna Niequist

23. “We create because we were made to create, having been made in the image of God, whose first role was Creator. He was and is a million different things, but in the beginning, he was a creator. That means something for us, I think. We were made to be the things that he is: forgivers, redeemers, second chance-givers, truth-tellers, hope-bringers. And we were certainly, absolutely, made to be creators.”

— Shauna Niequist

24. “I know that life is busy and hard, and that there’s crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don’t. Please don’t. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader, because of the art that you make.”

— Shauna Niequist

25. “Life with God at its core is about giving your life up to something bigger and more powerful. It’s about saying at every turn that God knows better than we know, and that his Spirit will lead us in ways that we couldn’t have predicted. I have known that, but I haven’t really lived that.”

— Shauna Niequist

26. “I don’t believe that God’s up in heaven making things go terribly wrong in our lives so that we learn better manners and better coping skills. But I do believe in something like composting for the soul: that if you can find life out of death, if you can use the smashed up garbage to bring about something new and good, however tiny, that’s one of the most beautiful things there is.”

— Shauna Niequist

27. “It’s so easy to think that because you can’t do something extraordinary, you can’t do anything at all. It’s easy to decide that if you can’t overhaul your entire life in one fell swoop, then you might as well just do nothing. We started where we could, with what we had. I hope it’s just the beginning for us.”

— Shauna Niequist

28. “And the best, most redeeming, exciting thing I can imagine, from the smashed-up, broken place I’ve been, is that something beautiful could blossom out of the wreckage... This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us.”

— Shauna Niequist

29. “If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.”

— Shauna Niequist

30. “Present over perfect living is real over image, connecting over comparing, meaning over mania, depth over artifice. Present over perfect living is the risky and revolutionary belief that the world God has created is beautiful and valuable on its own terms, and that it doesn’t need to be zhuzzed up and fancy in order to be wonderful. Sink.”

— Shauna Niequist

31. “Because there really is nothing like good friends, like the sounds of their laughter and the tones of their voices and the things they teach us in the quietest, smallest moments.”

— Shauna Niequist

32. “The world will tell you how to live, if you let it. Don’t let it. Take up your space. Raise your voice. Sing your song. This is your chance to make or remake a life that thrills you.”

— Shauna Niequist

33. “I’ve spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won’t leave, and fearing that it’s a matter of time before they figure me out and go.”

— Shauna Niequist

34. “Food is a language of care, the thing we do when traditional language fails us, when we don’t know what to say, when there are no words to say.”

— Shauna Niequist

35. “This is what I’ve come to believe about change: it’s good, in the way that childbirth is good, and heartbreak is good, and failure is good. By that I mean that it’s incredibly painful, exponentially more so if you fight it, and also that it has the potential to open you up, to open life up, to deliver you right into the palm of God’s hand, which is where you wanted to be all along, except that you were too busy pushing and pulling your life into exactly what you thought it should be.”

— Shauna Niequist

36. “Now is your time. Become, believe, try. Walk closely with people you love, and with other people who believe that God is very good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t spend time with people who make you feel like less than you are. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life’s path.”

— Shauna Niequist

37. “Age, like numbers on a scale and letters on a report card, tells us very little of who we are. You decide every year exactly how young and how old you want to be.”

— Shauna Niequist

38. “When you eat, I want you to think of God, of the holiness of hands that feed us, of the provision we are given every time we eat. When you eat bread and you drink wine, I want you to think about the body and the blood every time, not just when the bread and wine show up in church, but when they show up anywhere – on a picnic table or a hardwood floor or a beach.”

— Shauna Niequist

39. “You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural.”

— Shauna Niequist

40. “I want to cultivate a deep sense of gratitude, of groundedness, of enough, even while I’m longing for something more. The longing and the gratitude, both. I’m practicing believing that God knows more than I know, that he sees what I can’t, that he’s weaving a future I can’t even imagine from where I sit this morning.”

— Shauna Niequist

41. “You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.”

— Shauna Niequist

42. “TRAVEL BREATHES new life into our sense of what is possible, and allows us to see our lives from a new perspective. When was the last time a new location opened up something new in you?”

— Shauna Niequist

43. “We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day.”

— Shauna Niequist

44. “Busyness is an illness of the spirit. – Eugene Peterson.”

— Shauna Niequist

45. “There’s nothing small or inconsequential about our stories. There is, in fact, nothing bigger. And when we tell the truth about our lives – the broken parts, the secret parts, the beautiful parts – then the gospel comes to life, an actual story about redemption, instead of abstraction and theory and things you learn in Sunday school.”

— Shauna Niequist

46. “Now I know that the best thing I can offer to this world is not my force or energy, but a well-tended spirit, a wise and brave soul.”

— Shauna Niequist

47. “In my experience, you can never go wrong with flowers and food, even when someone insists that there’s nothing at all you can do.”

— Shauna Niequist

48. “Risotto is one of those dishes you just have to try a few times yourself, to teach yourself the moves and sounds and smells and textures. This is a guide map, but kind of a rough and tattered one.”

— Shauna Niequist

49. “You cannot taste the oil until you pour out the vinegar.”

— Shauna Niequist

50. “Food and cooking are among the richest subjects in the world. Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight, and refresh us. Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart’s astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around.”

— Shauna Niequist