Quotes from Donald Miller

Every day you live is a page. Every year, a chapter. Your life, a book. What is it about?

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.

His prescription to experience a deep sense of meaning, then, was remarkably pragmatic. He had three recommendations: 1. Have a project to work on, some reason to get out of bed in the morning and preferably something that serves other people. 2. Have a redemptive perspective on life's challenges. That is, when something difficult happens, recognize the ways that difficulty also serves you. 3. Share your life with a person or people who love you unconditionally.

He wasn't just calling them into a life of sacrifice. He was calling them into a life of meaning, even the kind of meaning that would involve suffering. Suffering for a redemptive reason is hardly suffering, after all.

Brands that give customers a voice in a larger narrative add value to their products by giving their customers a deeper sense of meaning.

Now that you've established the first three sections as a positive, negative, and then positive movement in the story, your customers are likely hooked.

For a moment sitting there above the city, i imagined life outside of narcissism. I wondered how beautiful it might be to think of others as more important than myself. I wondered how peaceful it might be not to be pestered by that childish voice that wants for pleasure and attention. I wondered how it would be like not to live in a house of mirrors, everywhere i go being reminded of myself.

If I do not introduce people to Jesus, then I don't believe Jesus is an important person. It doesn't matter what I say.

It's a phone call in the morning to pray about our day, a text-message to say I'm thinking of her, a handwritten note, a postcard when I'm out of town on business, remembering what drink she likes when we're at a bar, asking follow-up questions about her friends, and not hiding behind humor when it's time for a serious conversation.

You get a feeling when you look back on life that that's all God really wants from us, to live inside a body he made and enjoy the story and bond with us through the experience.

Some people think of it as the longing for God, and I think they're on to something. In my opinion, though, that longing will never be satisfied in our lifetime. In other words, I'm convinced every person has a longing that will never be fulfilled and it's our job to let it live and breathe and suffer within it as a way of developing our character.

Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him.