John Piper quotes: the theologian’s most popular quotes.
“Stay on the road of objective truth. There is objective being and objective value. Stay on the road. There is truth. There is a point and purpose and essence to it all. Keep searching. You will find it.”
“At the heart of the meaning of work is creativity. Your work is to create out of nothing.”
“Darkness comes. In the middle of it, the future looks blank. The temptation to quit is huge. Don’t. You are in good company. You will argue with yourself that there is no way forward. But nothing is impossible. Wait. Hope.”
“Life is a process of restoration and renewal. Our joy is not static. It fluctuates with real life.”
“We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan.”
“God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion.”
“Don’t coast through life without a passion.”
“Enjoying and displaying are both crucial. The wasted life is the life without a passion.”
“Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.”
“It isn’t the size of the window that determines how much you see. It’s which way the window is facing, and how close you are, and whether the glass is clear.”
“Tasks don’t have to be high-impact to be worthy of high effort. Most things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. The cumulative impact of thousands of low-impact tasks is huge.”
“You can’t ever be your heroes, but you can love their gifts.”
“You can’t praise what you don’t prize.”
“Let the freedom to fail give you the hope to fight.”
“If you cannot embrace the pain of learning but must have instant gratification, you forfeit the greatest rewards of life.”
“Education is helping people understand something they don’t already understand. Or, more accurately, education is helping people (young or old) learn how to get an understanding that they didn’t already have. Education is cultivating the life of the mind so that it knows how to grow in true understanding.”
“If you are sufficient for your task, it’s too small.”
“We weren’t meant to be somebody; we were meant to know somebody.”
“Asking questions is the key to understanding.”
“The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness.”
“The right creative act makes its own laws, and always will do.”
“Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.”
“If that isn’t your experience now, it will be. It’s just around the corner. If this is a bright day for you, the dark day is around the corner. If this is a dark day for you, there’s a brighter day coming.”
“Do all things without grumbling.”
“We want people to like us and admire us and speak well of us.”
“There is no point in winning an argument if you know or suspect you are wrong.”
“The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.”
“There is hope in forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness costs us nothing. All our costly obedience is the fruit, not the root, of being forgiven. That’s why we call it grace.”
“Redemption is not perfection. The redeemed must realize their imperfections.”
“Pride is no respecter of persons. The serious thinkers may be humble, and the careless mystics may be arrogant.”
“Emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought.”
“Emotions are like a river flowing out of one’s heart. Form is like the riverbanks. Without them the river runs shallow and dissipates on the plain. But banks make the river run deep. Why else have humans for centuries reached for poetry when we have deep affections to express? The creation of a form happens because someone feels a passion.”
“Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.”
“Books don’t change people; paragraphs do. Sometimes even sentences.”
“Here is a vocation that will bring you more satisfaction than if you became a millionaire 10 times over: develop the extraordinary skill for detecting the burdens of others and devote yourself daily to making them lighter.”
“Giving is a way of having what you need.”
“The whole world lives for pleasure.”
“Love is doing what will enthrall the beloved with the greatest and longest joy. Love means doing all we can, at whatever cost to ourselves, to help people be enthralled.”
“Your mind was made to know and love God.”
“Faith begins with a backward look at the cross, but it lives with a forward look at the promises.”
“We embrace the hand we’ve been dealt.”
“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.”
“Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst.”
“It is better to lose your life than to waste it.”
“But whatever you do, find the passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.”
“You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one.”
“Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don’t presume you will have it tomorrow, and don’t waste it today.”
“You will leave all your material wealth behind, but a wealth of knowledge goes with you.”
“I want to learn from everybody.”
“Reading is more important to me than eating.”
“I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.”
“I didn’t want a minimal life. I didn’t want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it.”
“I am created to magnify the glory of God—not the way a microscope magnifies (making small things look bigger than they are), but the way a telescope magnifies (making things that appear small to the world look as gigantic as they really are).”
“I’ve always wondered, am I a writer who preaches or a preacher who writes? I don’t know. I love them both. I just want to preach so bad I can hardly stand it. I love what I do.”
“I will not waste my life! I will finish my course and finish it well.”
“Resolved: to live with all my might while I do live.”
“Make this the year you stop complaining about your weaknesses, and instead search for their God-given purpose.”
