John Eldredge's Quotes

I'm married. I have three children. I have a mortgage to pay. The plumbing breaks and the yard needs trimming. However, what my wife and children need most from me is my passion for them.

Falling in love with God is the most important thing a person can do.

It takes great courage to be vulnerable. It takes enormous strength to be a real woman.

Reading the Gospels, without the personality of Jesus, is like watching television with the sound turned off.

To be in theater you have to be a kind of psychologist, for you're always trying to understand character and motives.

We don't live in the Garden. We live far from Eden. Every life is full of heartaches. Every life, frankly, is unspeakably sad.

Christianity has basically communicated to men that the reason God put you on this Earth is to be a good boy. Mind your manners, be a nice guy. That's soul killing!

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself, 'What makes me come alive?' Because what the world - a wife, a child - needs is men who have come alive.

I don't write anything that I haven't lived. In terms of integrity, you have to write what you live. And if you write beyond what you live, it is theory. And theory is not helpful. It is just not.

If only Jesus' followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity.

It was men who stopped slavery. It was men who ran up the stairs in the Twin Towers to rescue people. It was men who gave up their seats on the lifeboats of the Titanic. Men are made to take risks and live passionately on behalf of others.

Most Christians are still living with an Old Testament view of their heart. Jeremiah 17:9 says, 'My heart is deceitfully wicked.' No, it's not. Not after the work of Christ, because the promise of the new covenant is a new heart.

Most of us live in a fog. It's like life is a movie we arrived to 20 minutes late. You know something important seems to be going on. But we can't figure out the story. We don't know what part we're supposed to play or what the plot is.

What strikes me about Jesus is that he is a remarkably true person; he never changes his personality to fit in with whatever crowd he finds himself. He is simply himself, and he never plays to his audience.

When a woman forsakes her vulnerability because she's been hurt or because she lives in a dangerous world or doesn't want to be used, she loses something essential about being a woman.

Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird.

History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.

Reading the epitaphs, our only salvation lies in resurrecting the dead and burying the living.

There are those whose sole claim to profundity is the discovery of exceptions to the rules.