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Donald Miller Quotes

Total quotes: 11
“I began to wonder what life would be like if I dropped the act and began to trust that being myself would be enough to get the love I needed.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy
Tagged: Life, Wonder, Love, mysterious
“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story
Tagged: Perfection, People, Love, Idealism
“I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.”
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
Tagged: Books, Bibliophile, Reader, Words, Escapism, Imagination
“Sometimes the story we’re telling the world isn’t half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“I’ve come to believe a person’s love for you can’t grow unless you hold that person loosely.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“Here are two things I found taking the long road, though: Applause is a quick fix. And love is an acquired taste.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology
“It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don’t have integrity, life becomes exhausting.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“It’s no wonder I hid from the world. It’s no wonder parties made me tired or I got exhausted after I spoke. It’s no wonder criticism made me angry or I overreacted to failure. I think the part of me I sent out to interact with the world was, in some ways, underdeveloped, still trying to be bigger and smarter as a measure of survival.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“A group therapist created a terrific visual example of what a healthy relationship looks like. She put three pillows on the floor and asked a couple of us to stand on the pillows. She told us to leave the middle pillow open. She pointed at my pillow and said, "Don, that's your pillow, that's your life. The only person who gets to step on that pillow is you. Nobody else. That's your territory, your soul." Then she pointed at my friend's pillow and told her that was her pillow, that she owned it and it was her soul. Then, the therapist said, the middle pillow symbolized the relationship. She said that both of us could step into the middle pillow any time we wanted because we'd agreed to be in a relationship. However, she said, at no point is it appropriate to step on the other person's pillow. What goes on in the other person's soul is none of your business. All you're responsible for is your soul, nobody else's. Regarding the middle pillow, the question to ask is, "What do I want in a relationship?" If the pillow you two step on together works, that's great. If not, move on or simply explain what you'd like life to feel like in the middle pillow and see if the other person wants that kind of relationship too. But never, she said, ever try to change each other. Know who you are and know what you want in a relationship, and give people the freedom to be themselves.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“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. Frankl called this treatment logotherapy, or a therapy of meaning. And surprisingly, it worked. He was put in charge of the mental-health division of the Viennese hospital system because they had lost far too many patients to suicide. When Frankl came aboard, he had more than thirty thousand suicidal patients under his care. The challenge was phenomenal. Frankl created community groups for the patients and taught counselors to identify projects the patients could contribute to, serious work the world needed that would give them a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Frankl also had the patients circle the difficult experiences they’d had and while allowing them to grieve, also asked them to list benefits that had come from their pain. The result of the program was transformational. Not one patient committed suicide on Frankl’s watch.”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“Here’s a thought that haunts me: What if we are designed as sensitive antennas, receptors to receive love, a longing we often mistake as a need to be impressive? What if some of the most successful people in the world got that way because their success was fueled by a misappropriated need for love? What if the people we consider to be great are actually the most broken? And what if the whole time they’re seeking applause they are missing out on true intimacy because they’ve never learned how to receive it?”
— Donald Miller, Scary Close
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
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