Quotes from John Eldredge

the Self stakes out its own territory within us to assure getting its own way, ordering our world to its likings. It has imbedded assumptions and privileges in our psyche; there is a momentum to its desires, motives, and presence in us. I call this the Self Life.

Beauty is one of the richest graces God has provided to heal our souls and absorb his goodness.

The rooted person is able to meditate—give sustained attention to—the revelation of God. Not swipe, not multitask. Lingering focus.

All of us are partly living our story line the enemy offers us. Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won't change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to leave us in such a place practicing our religion.

There is a satisfaction we don't want to come to until we come to it in God....[Disappointments] serve to remind us every day that we cannot make life work the way we want....If we'll let it, the disappointment can be God's way of continually drawing us back to himself.

If strangers and strange sights can shake the world of children, it takes the people they know and love best to pull it out from under them like a chair.

Teach a man a rule and you help him solve a problem; teach a man to walk with God and you help him solve the rest of his life.

When it comes to the moral question, it is not simply whether we say yes or no to desire, but always what we do with desire. Christianity recognizes that we have desire gone mad within us. But it does not seek to rectify the problem by killing desire; rather, it seeks the healing of desire, just as it seeks the healing of every other part of our human being.

Samson becomes a great and terrible warrior when, and only when, the Spirit of God comes upon him. The rest of the time he's just short of an idiot. What does this story tell us about the God whose Spirit this is?

The whole, vast world was incomplete without me. Creation reached its finishing touch in me.

The greatest human tragedy is to give up the search. Nothing is of greater importance than the life of our deep heart. To lose heart is to lose everything.

What have we to offer, really, other than who we are and what God has been pouring into our lives? It was not by accident that you were born; it was not by chance that you have the desires you do. The Victorious Trinity has planned on your being here now, "for such a time as this" (Esther 4:14). We need you.