Rob Bell quotes: the author’s most popular sayings.
“You create your life. You get to shape it, form it, steer it, make it into something. And you have way more power to do this than you realize.”
“What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work. The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it’s all part of how you create your life.”
“All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world.”
“What we do comes out of who we believe we are.”
“What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.”
“It’s absolutely crucial that we come face to face with the power of our choices.”
“How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative act. We have power, more power than we realize, power to decide that we are going to make something good.”
“You know about head games—those voices in your head, questioning who you are and what you’re doing. Telling you you’re no good. Somewhere between our hearts and our minds is an internal dialogue, a running commentary on what we think and feel and believe. It’s the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that’s jammed on ‘repeat,’ these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren’t clear and focused and grounded.”
“You have a list of all the things you aren’t, the things you can’t do, the things you’ve tried that didn’t go well. Regrets, mistakes that haunt you, moments when you crawled home in humiliation. For many of us, this list is the source of a number of head games usually involving the words: not smart enough, not talented enough, not disciplined enough, not educated enough, not beautiful, thin, popular, or hardworking enough—you can fill in the blank.”
“Who ‘they’ are isn’t interesting. We all have our they: friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, superstars who appear to skate by effortlessly while we slog it out. They are the people we fixate on, constantly holding their lives up to our life, using their apparent ease and success as an excuse to hold back from doing our work and pursuing our path in the world.”
“There will always be someone who’s smarter than you. There will always be someone with more raw talent than you. There will always be someone more experienced and better qualified and harder working and stronger and more articulate and more creative with more stamina who can sing better than you can. But who you aren’t isn’t interesting. And who they are isn’t interesting when it comes to who you are and what your path is.”
“Now, let’s pause and take a breath. You’ve been given this gift of life. You were not given his gift or her gift. You were given your gift.”
“I specifically remember thinking that even if I wasn’t very good at giving sermons, I had found something that would get me out of bed in the morning.”
“Your ikigai (reason for being) is a web of work and family and play and how you spend your time, what you give your energies to, what you say yes to, what you say no to, what new challenges you take on, things that come your way that you never wanted or planned for or know what to do with. Your ikigai is a work in progress because you are a work in progress.”
“The one thing unites the people I know who are on satisfying and meaningful paths is that they kept trying things, kept exploring, kept exploring new opportunities, kept searching until they discovered their ikigai. And then from there they never stop figuring it out because they understand how absolutely crucial this is in creating a life worth living.”
“Listen to your life. Look back on the moments when you felt most connected to the world around you. Think about those experiences in which you felt the most comfortable in your own skin. Reflect on when you were most aware of something wrong in the world and your strong response to it.”
“There’s a good chance your ikigai will change over time. Finding your ikigai will be endlessly challenging, or you may already have found it. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as thinking differently about what you’re already doing. Sometimes you discover your ikigai by understanding what you do in a whole new way.”
“Whatever you do all day, do you see it as a craft? Seeing your work as craft rescues you. Craft centers you. Craft reconnects you to your ikigai. They joy of waking up and having something to give yourself to—that’s what matters, that’s where the joy is, that’s where the life is.”
“Some people are stuck. And they remain stuck. And they don’t get unstuck because they can’t get their minds around the whole thing. But you don’t have to get your mind around the whole thing, you only have to get your mind around the one.”
“That’s what fear does to you—fear stops you dead in your tracks. Fear can keep you from harm, but fear can also rob you of your potential. Fear can rob you of an experience. Fear can rob you of happiness. Fear can rob you of real life. Darkness has a way of scaring us.”
“Fear wants us to become obsessed with some event or person in the future, a year, a month, even a day. It also wants us to look backwards not at our successes, but our short-comings and our failures. Fear loses its grip when we stay in the now.”
“The lesson that has been hardest for me to learn: there is nothing to prove.”
“The best team does not always win, it’s the team that plays the best.”
“You want people who are both great fans and supporters and believers of your work and people who are also ruthlessly honest. People who will tell you the truth about it.”
“It is better to be fully present and rested and engaged for one thing than rushed, distracted, and scattered for ten.”
“Freedom is not having everything we crave, it’s being able to go without the things we crave and being okay with it.”
“You can set your intention to better understand your soul, your spirit, through daily practices like prayer, yoga and meditation, etc.”
“Creating and sharing beautiful things has provided me with the inspiration that we can do things we never thought we could do and that we will get to see wonderful things we never thought we would see.”
“To me some of the greatest writing is when somebody puts something in words that you felt and experienced and you go, that’s it.”
“Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.”
“We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world.”
“It often takes suffering and loss in order to remind us of how precious life is.”
“Hope. People want hope. We crave hope. We long for hope. Hope has been present since the very beginning. And almost in the worst situations of human history, you often find the greatest amount of hope. The very nature of the situation, the way stepped-on people created within them even more hope than when things were going fine. Hope has always been around.”
“There’s nothing wrong with possessions; it’s just that they have value to us only when we use them, engage them, and enjoy them. They’re nouns that mean something only in conjunction with verbs. That’s why wealth is so dangerous: if you’re not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.”
“We often rush through the experiences that have the greatest shift.”
“There are moments when we have to return to our roots.”
“Some things you do for you. So don’t apologize for it, enjoy it. Some things we do fill us with life so that we can give ourselves to our work in the world with greater love and vitality and passion. Some things we get paid for, some things we don’t.”
“Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new.”
“The life that you want begins the moment you embrace the life you have because all of it is a miracle.”
“The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true.”
“Your life is a gift and how you respond to it—what you do with it—matters. That’s where I start.”
“My interest is in what’s true, where is the life, where is the heart and what inspires.”
“You’re here, you’re breathing, you are the recipient of an extraordinary act of generosity called life.”
