Explore Quotes by Brennan Manning

Only reckless confidence in a Source greater than ourselves can empower us to forgive the woulds inflicted by others.

Without fear I can acknowledge that the authentic Christian tension is not between life and death, but between life and life.

In Love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve.

We are not cowed into timidity by death and life. Were we forced to rely on our own shabby resources we would be pitiful people in deed. But the awareness of Christ's present risenness persuades us that we are buoyed up and carried on by a life greater than our own.

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God... It is a strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this but actually they are disdaining God's "crooked but straight path". It is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform service and that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.

Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any call), everybody has a vocation to be a person to be fully and deeply human in Christ Jesus.

None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.

The litmus test of our love for God is our love of neighbor.

What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.

Real freedom is freedom from the opinions of others. Above all, freedom from your opinions about yourself.

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.

I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone. I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and at the same time an awesome, incomprehensible, and unwieldy Mystery.

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

It is for the inconsistent, unsteady disciples whose cheese is falling off their cracker.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means.

There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are.

When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments and the surprises of the Spirit.

No man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words

Do the truth quietly without display.

When a man or woman is truly honest, it is virtually impossible to insult them personally.