Top 150 Ted Dekker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Dive deep. Drown willingly.”

— Ted Dekker

2. “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

— Ted Dekker

3. “God is with me. Jesus is near. The Spirit is greater than my fear.”

— Ted Dekker

4. “The world’s bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can’t wait to die.”

— Ted Dekker

5. “In living we die, in dying we live.”

— Ted Dekker

6. “Turn to the light. Don’t fear the shadow it creates.”

— Ted Dekker

7. “You’ll have to learn to control your emotions. They’re new, like achild’s now, bursting with passion. Never let them fade, or part of you will die. But they cal also destroy you. Hold them dear, but don’t let them take hold of you.”

— Ted Dekker

8. “When the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you. But you do not belong to the world. I have brought you out of the world and that is why it hates you.”

— Ted Dekker

9. “In the end you will be your own undoing. You can’t escape you.”

— Ted Dekker

10. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Halleluiah amen, you are dismissed.”

— Ted Dekker

11. “This will wreck you! Today, treat everyone you meet as if they’re going to be dead by midnight. extend all the kindness and understanding you can, and do it with no thought of any reward.”

— Ted Dekker

12. “You will know the Truth and the Truth will set you free, for in that Truth you are free already.”

— Ted Dekker

13. “How can you hope to recognize good and evil for what they truly are if you have no belief in a moral authority greater than yourself?”

— Ted Dekker

14. “For me, writing is an experience. It’s an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions – about love, what does it mean to love? What’s beauty? What is true beauty?”

— Ted Dekker

15. “It’s critical that we use a very dark brush to paint evil. When you bring the light into that darkness as characterized in John 1, that light is very vivid. When it dispels the darkness, we see the brilliance that’s there.”

— Ted Dekker

16. “The light came into the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it, but that no longer mattered because the light was now obliteration the darkness.”

— Ted Dekker

17. “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness cannot understand it.”

— Ted Dekker

18. “Born of Black and White, Eaten with worms, I’m a Saint, a Sinner, a Siren of the Word, The Circle knows me, the rest just wanna trip on Grace Juice, Baby Showdown at midnight.”

— Ted Dekker

19. “It’s the sorrow you feel that allows you to crave love. Without the suffering, there would be no true pleasure. Without tears, no joy. Without deficiency, no longing. This is the secret of the human heart, Rom.”

— Ted Dekker

20. “Wage war on death. Live for love.”

— Ted Dekker

21. “When I sit down to write a novel, I am exploring my own relationship with God, with the struggle between good and evil, my own purpose.”

— Ted Dekker

22. “Yeshua shows us a Way of being saved in the midst of all that we think threatens us on the dark seas of our lives here on earth.”

— Ted Dekker

23. “Adrenaline dulls reason; panic kills it.”

— Ted Dekker

24. “Come hither, my dear. Come hither, that I mightest protectest thou!”

— Ted Dekker

25. “But sometimes imperfect tools lead us toward perfect ends.”

— Ted Dekker

26. “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s Veins. And those plunged beneath that watery grave to drink of His blood will never be the same.”

— Ted Dekker

27. “My idea for ‘BoneMan’s Daughters’ came from the loss of my own daughter when she left home to live with a monster at age 18. I wanted to throttle the man, but she was in love, so all I could do was hope, pray and cry.”

— Ted Dekker

28. “You never read Spider-Man? Accepting your true identity means understanding that you are a stranger to this world. A freak, ostracized by the very people you want to help.”

— Ted Dekker

29. “My research for ‘Adam’ affected me profoundly, particularly the research into evil’s underbelly. We tend not to think about evil until it pokes its head out of the air about us and then it tends to scare us silly. As well it should.”

— Ted Dekker

30. “That death isn’t death. It’s not the end because we aren’t just our minds or our bodies. We’re far more than just physical beings having a spiritual experience. We’re spiritual beings having a temporary physical experience.”

— Ted Dekker

31. “What was once obvious to them was no longer quite as obvious. Why was it that humans lost sight of truth so quickly?”

— Ted Dekker

32. “The light had simply and utterly destroyed the darkness.”

— Ted Dekker

33. “A person who finds silence and solitude boring is a person who is himself boring, empty of anything worth consideration.”

— Ted Dekker

34. “Our challenge isn’t in becoming more than we are, because we are already risen and complete. Our challenge is to remember and abide in who we are, each day and each hour.”

— Ted Dekker

35. “It is critical that writers who embrace the light of Christ’s redemptive love characterize the darkness arrayed against us in a way that is consistent with its true nature.”

— Ted Dekker

36. “Whenever you write on a subject that questions the status quo, there are bound to be many who wrestle with the issues.”

— Ted Dekker

37. “Anything unnatural was not naturally believed. Faith, in essence, was unnatural.”

— Ted Dekker

38. “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.”

— Ted Dekker

39. “Then maybe you can tell me something else. How is it that Elyon can allow evil to exist in the black forest? Why doesn’t he just destroy the Shataiki?” “Because evil provides his creation with a choice,” the child said as though the concept was very simple indeed. “And because without it, there could be no love.”

— Ted Dekker

40. “The pain was so deep and so raw. There were days I would have died just to forget. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out how to get her out of my mind. How do you kill that kind of pain?”

— Ted Dekker

41. “If you could find a way to peel back the skin of this world so to speak, would you really see this supernatural reality that is greater? Is it true that we fight not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers? Every young person wants to know.”

— Ted Dekker

42. “There’s a reason we are drawn to the light. A reason why we fear darkness. It’s important to be terrified and unnerved about certain things. That way we will choose another path. The path that leads us to truth and love.”

— Ted Dekker

43. “Some would say the Creator is a lamb. Some would say he’s a lion. Some would say both. The fact is, he is neither a lamb nor a lion. These are fiction. Metaphors. Yet the Creator is both a lamb and a lion. These are both truths.”

— Ted Dekker

44. “The battle over flesh and blood cannot compare to the battle for the heart.”

— Ted Dekker

45. “Everything we say, do, and think, aligns us with darkness or light, love or grievance. Thus everything is a spiritual practice, whether we are aware of it or not. We are constantly, in every moment, aligning with one way of being or another. The choice is ours to make each moment of the day.”

— Ted Dekker

46. “I always managed to get in trouble, like every kid. But I had to learn a lot of hard lessons on my own, without parents who would nurture me and guard me through that part of life, at a very young age.”

— Ted Dekker

47. “There is indeed good and there is indeed evil, and both walk the earth. But good has little to do with the forms of religion, and evil has as little to do with so much behavior condemned by religion. Both good and evil vie for the passions of the heart. For love!”

— Ted Dekker

48. “The kingdom of God is not about what we see with these eyes. It’s not about eating or drinking or walking or throwing away the crutches. Those can be good gifts, like wealth and prosperity. But they touch only the surface and they are quite incidental. His kingdom is about peace and joy and love and a kind of power that will turn your heart into a herd of thundering horses if you let it.” It.”

— Ted Dekker

49. “Remember, Caleb, words are weak instruments of love. They can do many things, but they do not carry the truth like your hands do. People need to be shown, not told.”

— Ted Dekker

50. “Then as now, evil begins its courtship cloaked in light. And the heart embraces what is should flee. Forgetting it once had a true lover. Love will prove greater than lust. Sacrifice will overcome seduction. And blood will flow.”

— Ted Dekker