Top 180 Shauna Niequist Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “But this is what I’ve learned the hard way: what people think about you means nothing in comparison to what you believe about yourself.”

— Shauna Niequist

102. “My impulse is always toward work, pushing, guilt, rushing. But what restores me, what allows me to interact well with my family, what allows me to get good writing done, is almost always the opposite. And I’m finding that when I practice things like rest, grace, peace, prayer, self-care and slowness, the work gets done just the same. Well, just the same except less crying and less apologizing to my family. I’ll take it.”

— Shauna Niequist

103. “What would our lives be like if our days were studded by tiny, completely unproductive, silly, nonstrategic, wild and beautiful five-minute breaks, reminders that our days are for loving and learning and laughing, not for pushing and planning, reminders that it’s all about the heart, not the hustle?”

— Shauna Niequist

104. “Go back to being loved; go back to your purpose. This thing I am being asked to do will not get me more love. And this will not help me meet my purpose. Some.”

— Shauna Niequist

105. “My regrets: how many years I bruised people with my fragmented, anxious presence. How many moments of connection I missed – too busy, too tired, too frantic and strung out on the drug of efficiency.”

— Shauna Niequist

106. “I don’t see the kids and the car seats and all the ways we’ve changed. What I see is a girl who was wild about a boy, and a bot who loved that girl right back. And it makes me happy to know they’re still in there, still inside us, like Russian dolls.”

— Shauna Niequist

107. “I don’t know if this is a season of sweetness or one of sadness. But I’m learning that neither last forever.”

— Shauna Niequist

108. “The problem is that the worldview I’ve chosen has melted like butter. I had a plan, and the plan is gone.”

— Shauna Niequist

109. “Just because you have the capacity to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Management, organization, speaking and traveling: you must ask not only what fruit they bring to the world, but what fruit they yield on the inside of your life and your heart. I.”

— Shauna Niequist

110. “The general world population will survive without one more stage production and one more gallery showing. This is the thing, though: you might not. We create because we were made to create, having been made in the image of God, whose first role was Creator.”

— Shauna Niequist

111. “As a host, you set the tone, and you set it right away. It’s so easy to get carried away with an ambitious menu, and then spend the whole night flinging things around your kitchen and being annoyed with your guests for having the audacity to try to talk with you. Terrible plan. Everyone would rather have a simpler meal and a happier host.”

— Shauna Niequist

112. “When I’ve regretting saying something on the internet, it’s never been about love. I’ve never regretting loving or encouraging or celebrating something. I have often regretted slamming or dismissing or criticizing something, because when I do that online, it’s outside of relationship, outside of shared understanding, outside of context. I.”

— Shauna Niequist

113. “But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, for that adventure, that movie-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of us will ever experience.”

— Shauna Niequist

114. “Let’s be courageous in these days. Let’s choose love and rest and grace. Let’s use our minutes and hours to create memories with the people we love instead of dragging them on one more errand or shushing them while we accomplish one more seemingly necessary thing.”

— Shauna Niequist

115. “What makes me feel alive and connected to God’s voice and spirit in this world is creating opportunities for the people I love to rest and connect and be fed at my table. I believe it’s the way I was made, and I believe it matters. For many years, I didn’t let it matter, for a whole constellation of reasons, but part of becoming yourself, in a deeply spiritual way, is finding the words to tell the truth about what it is you really love.”

— Shauna Niequist

116. “As I look back, in many instances, I simply followed the natural course of things. And great things happened, mostly. But over time I realized they weren’t necessarily great things for me. They were maybe someone else’s great things, and I was both taking up the space that was meant for them and not standing in my own space, like wearing someone else’s shoes, leaving them barefoot.”

— Shauna Niequist

117. “I didn’t ask you to become new and improved today. That wasn’t the goal. You were broken down and strange yesterday, and you still are today, and the only one freaked out about it is you.”

— Shauna Niequist

118. “Who’s the boss, if not us? Who’s forcing us to live this way? Or, possibly, do we not want to face the answer to that question, preferring to believe we can’t possibly be held responsible for what we’ve done?”

— Shauna Niequist

119. “I understand the temptation to draw an angry X through a whole season or a whole town or a whole relationship, to crumple it up and throw it away, to get it as far away as possible from a new life, a new future. But I think that’s both the easiest and the most cowardly choice. These days I’m walking over and retrieving those years from the trash, erasing the X, unlocking the door. It’s the only way that darkness turns to light.”

— Shauna Niequist

120. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. – John Steinbeck.”

— Shauna Niequist

121. “I don’t make our bed in the morning, standing firm on the adolescent belief that there’s no sense in doing something you’re just going to undo at the end of the day.”

— Shauna Niequist

122. “It seems to me that one of the great hazards is quick love, which is actually charm. We get used to smiling, hugging, bantering, practicing good eye contact. And it’s easier then true, slow, awkward and painful connection with someone who sees all the worst parts of you. Your act is easy. Being with you, deeply with, is difficult.”

— Shauna Niequist

123. “Oh, the quiet moments alone with God I sacrificed in order to cross a few things off the to-do list I worshiped.”

— Shauna Niequist

124. “I’ve learned that in many cases, change is not a function of life’s cruelty but instead a function of God’s graciousness.”

— Shauna Niequist

125. “And that’s the core of prayer: admitting that just maybe, there’s something going on that we can’t see. So when I’m afraid, I pray, and I ask for God’s help, that I will be able to see something I wasn’t able to see before, or at least trust him to do the seeing.”

— Shauna Niequist

126. “I’m learning that both body and soul require more tenderness and attentiveness than I had imagined.”

— Shauna Niequist

127. “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. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen.”

— Shauna Niequist

128. “But what I eventually realized is that the return on investment was not what I’d imagined, and that the expectations were only greater and greater. When you devote yourself to being known as the most responsible person anyone knows, more and more people call on you to be that highly responsible person. That’s how it works. So the armload of things I was carrying became higher and higher, heavier and heavier, more and more precarious. At.”

— Shauna Niequist

129. “Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands.”

— Shauna Niequist

130. “Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences.”

— Shauna Niequist

131. “So now, out of desperation, I’m back to prayer. I’m back to prayer, sheepishly, because I couldn’t make my life work without it. I pray out of sheer lack of options.”

— Shauna Niequist

132. “What I’m finding is that when I’m hungry, lots of times what I really want more than food is an external voice to say, “You’ve done enough. It’s OK to be tired. You can take a break. I’ll take care of you. I see how hard you’re trying.” There is, though, no voice that can say that except the voice of God. The work I’m doing now is to let those words fall deeply on me, to give myself permission to be tired, to be weak, to need.”

— Shauna Niequist

133. “I believe still today what I have always believed: that God is good, that the world he made is extraordinary, and that his comfort is like nothing else on earth.”

— Shauna Niequist

134. “Present is choosing to believe that your own life is worth investing deeply in, instead of waiting for some rare miracle or fairy tale.”

— Shauna Niequist

135. “What powers our work when it’s no longer about addiction to achievement?”

— Shauna Niequist

136. “We decide where the time goes. There’s so much freedom in that, and so much responsibility.”

— Shauna Niequist

137. “It’s from our souls that we love, that we feel, that we create, that we connect.”

— Shauna Niequist

138. “WE LIVE out the love of God when we care for those he brings into our lives. Have you ever been surprised by who you came to love, because they became yours in some way?”

— Shauna Niequist

139. “Every year, you will trade a little of your perfect skin and your ability to look great without exercising for wisdom and peace and groundedness, and every year the trade will be worth it. I promise.”

— Shauna Niequist

140. “It has come to me with a fight. It has come to me the hard way, through tears and fog and fear and chaos, and now has landed in the palm of my hand like a firefly. There now, I have had my vision.”

— Shauna Niequist

141. “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.”

— Shauna Niequist

142. “Some of the most life-shaping decisions you make in this season will be about walking away from good-enough, in search of can’t-live-without.”

— Shauna Niequist

143. “I became the person people don’t want to tell they’re pregnant. I hate that. A friend told me her happy, fantastic news, and just a second later she burst out crying, afraid for how this would make me feel. I hate that. I work really hard to arrange my face in such a way that approximates uncomplicated glee. And I am happy for them, or course. But sometimes just after the happiness is the desperation. Some days are easier than others.”

— Shauna Niequist

144. “I believe in mining through the darkest seasons in our lives and choosing to believe that we’ll find something important every time.”

— Shauna Niequist

145. “For some of us, the addiction to motion is so deep, so pervasive, that only dramatic gestures are enough to take hold.”

— Shauna Niequist

146. “And also that God’s will has a lot more to do with inviting us to become more than we previously have been than about getting us to one very specific destination. God’s will, should we choose to engage in it, will generally feel like surgery, rooting out all the darkness and fear we’ve come to live with.”

— Shauna Niequist

147. “To pray is to say that there is more than I can see, and more than I can do. There is more going on than meets the eye.”

— Shauna Niequist

148. “What I’m learning, essentially, is to stand where I am, plain and sometimes tired. Unflashy, profoundly unspectacular. But present and connected and grounded deeply in the love of God, which is changing everything.”

— Shauna Niequist

149. “IT’S EASY to long for nothing but good news and carefree days, but a full life includes the broken and dark and difficult parts, too. Thank God for walking with you in the seasons of heartbreak.”

— Shauna Niequist

150. “I want businesses and government systems and certainly churches to be led more and more often by women. I believe that men and women would both benefit from it in dozens of ways. But if that’s going to happen, I think we have to declare a princess-free zone. No tiaras, no Girls Gone Wild, no pretending we can’t carry things. No fairytales, no waiting around to be rescued, and absolutely no playing dumb.”

— Shauna Niequist