Tim Keller quotes: the theologian sounds off.
“Whatever you base your life on, you have to live up to that.”
“What you do today is shaped by what you believe about tomorrow. How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.”
“We are very busy, doing things day to day, reaching our goals, but those three things make you stand back and look at the big questions of: what am I really doing here? What’s my life for? Every one of those moments makes you ask bigger questions.”
“How do you change your behavior? Change what you worship.”
“Everyone worships something. The only choice you get is what to worship.”
“The way to find your calling is to look at the way you were created. Your gifts have not emerged by accident.”
“Work is taking the raw material of creation and developing it for the sake of others.”
“Fear, logic and tradition are not going to make you live a good life when no one is looking.”
“To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking.”
“If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.”
“Your feelings come from where you find your hope. Where is your happiness and your significance?”
“What the heart most wants, the mind finds reasonable, the will finds doable, and the emotions find desirable.”
“Out of weakness comes real strength.”
“Reason can get you to probability, but only commitment can get you to certainty.”
“Change happens not just by giving the mind new arguments but also by feeding the imagination new beauties.”
“You won’t be able to change the world, yourself, anything, if you don’t change yourself inwardly, deeply, enduringly.”
“Just because you cannot realize your highest aspirations in work does not mean you have chosen wrongly, or are not called to your profession, or that you should spend your life looking for the perfect career that is devoid of frustration. You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.”
“We must not settle for an informed mind without an engaged heart.”
“Success and suffering will either darken your heart or make you wise, but they won’t leave you where you were.”
“Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.”
“We need to remember that we are saved by grace when we fail. But we need to remember it much more when we succeed.”
“A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.”
“If you seek to serve people more than to gain power, you will not only serve people, you will gain influence.”
“There’s nothing that makes you more miserable (or less interesting) than self-absorption.”
“By comparing ourselves to other people and trying to make ourselves look better than others, we are boasting. Trying to recommend ourselves, trying to create a self-esteem resume because we are desperate to fill our sense of inadequacy and emptiness. The ego is busy. So busy all the time.”
“The lack of joy in your life is due to your lack of mission.”
“Nothing is more important than to learn how to maintain a life of purpose in the midst of painful adversity.”
“We don’t merely need the money from work to survive. We need the work itself to survive and live fully human lives more than money.”
“Money isn’t an idol. It just shows you where your idols are.”
“The human heart is an idol factory that takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.”
“Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.”
“Love is counting someone else’s needs and interests as more important than your own needs or interests or comfort.”
“There are some needs only you can see. There are some hands only you can hold. There are some people only you can reach.”
“Generosity is not only about money. There is more than one currency. Let your generosity be pervasive in life.”
“We have to be careful not to elevate our preferences to moral standards and judge others by them. We only do so to feel superior.”
“Our character is mainly shaped by our primary social community—the people with whom we eat, play, converse and study.”
“Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.”
“Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.”
“Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.”
“Holding a grudge against someone means you think you know what they deserve and you take it upon yourself to give it to them.”
“Forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness. To not retaliate is to absorb the cost. The essence of forgiveness is absorbing pain instead of giving it.”
“The more you rejoice in your own forgiveness, the quicker you will be to forgive others.”
“Faith is not primarily a function of how you feel. Faith is living out and believing what truth is despite what you feel.”
“If at the very least, faith is what you trust in, then everyone has faith in something.”
“The world values power, comfort, success, and recognition. Jesus frees us to value grief, sacrifice, weakness and exclusion.”
“Freedom is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.”
“Think like a prophet, serve like a priest and plan like a king.”
Related: Louie Giglio quotes.
