Donald Miller Quotes
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I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.
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The real voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and profane. It's not an agitated voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom.
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If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.
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When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.
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Without a positive male role model in your life, it is extremely difficult to become a man who benefits his family and benefits society.
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Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.
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If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.
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No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.
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I think our society puts too much pressure on romantic love, and that is why so many romances fail. Romance can't possibly carry all that we want it to.
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I think that every living person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group thinking, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there, the problem is the needy beast of a thing living in my chest.
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Half the time I don't know what I'm trying to say.
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The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is 'Do not fear.' It's in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn't let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
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Right, but you know, what would any of us lose by losing our possessions. Maybe we would gain something, like relationships, like the beauty of good friends, intimacy, you know what I mean, man? Like we wouldn't be losing anything if we lost our stuff, we'd be gaining everything.
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And when you find love, or when you are mature enough to understand it, the feeling you get is gratitude.
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The very scary thing about religion, to me, is that people actually believe God is who they think He is.
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Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.
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I started 'Storyline' after I'd accomplished all my goals and still wasn't happy. I'd become a 'New York Times' bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.
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Great stories move through fear.
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When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.
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I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.
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Flattery has a short battery life, but reminding people they are amazing and precious and wanted and works of art can truly change their lives.
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At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has given you without holding them accountable.
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Instead of asking what it feels like to follow God or be used by God, we should be asking who God is, and whether we really know Him. Everything else will take care of itself.
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Moral #1: "If you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life." Moral #2: Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.