Quotes from Don't Waste Your Life

“All heroes are shadows of Christ”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth "home." Before you know it, I am calling luxeries "needs" and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“My joy grows with every soul that seeks the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Remember, you have one life. That’s all. You were made for
God. Don’t waste it.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“I will not waste my life! I will finish my course and finish it well. I will display the Gospel of the grace of God in all I do. I will run my race to the end.” - Paul”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. (on CS Lewis)”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“God without Christ is no God.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us—a crucified God—must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“The answer, The answer, my friend, is not yours to invent or create. It will be decided for you. It is outside you. It is real and objective and firm. One day you will hear it. You don’t create it. You don’t define it. It comes to you, and sooner or later you conform to it—or bow to it.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“Don’t be surprised. There is nothing new under the sun. Only endless repackagings”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“God will not turn away from doing you good. He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to His children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and He never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going bad that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means He is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving Him.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“Your mind was made to know and love God.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“It was becoming clearer and clearer that if I wanted to come to the end of my life and not say, “I’ve wasted it!” then I would need to press all the way in, and all the way up, to the ultimate purpose of God and join him in it. If my life was to have a single, all-satisfying, unifying passion, it would have to be God’s passion.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“God seldom calls us for an easier life, but always calls us to know more of him and drink more deeply of His sustaining grace.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“Why don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“The "war" is being fought along the line between sin and righteousness in every family. It is being fought along the line between truth and falsehood in every school... Between justice and injustice in every legislature... Between integrity and corruption in every office... Between love and hate in every ethnic group... Between pride and humility in every sport... Between the beautiful and the ugly in every art... Between right doctrine and wrong doctrine in every church... Between sloth and diligence between coffee breaks. It is not a waste to fight the battle for truth and faith and love on any of these fronts.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“The thought of building a life around minimal morality or minimal significance—a life defined by the question, “What is permissible?”—felt almost disgusting to me. I didn’t want a minimal life. I didn’t want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

“A mind fed daily on TV diminishes. Your mind was made to know and love God.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life

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Popular quotes

“Maybe we should do some more homework.”
Homework had been their code word for making out before they’d realized that they hadn’t been fooling anyone.
But Jay was true to his word, especially his code word, and his lips settled over hers. Violet suddenly forgot that she was pretending to break free from his grip. Her frail resolve crumbled. She reached out, wrapping her arms around his neck, and pulled him closer to her.
Jay growled from deep in his throat. “Okay, homework it is.”
He pulled her against him, until they were lying face-to-face, stretched across the length of the couch. It wasn’t long before she was restless, her hands moving impatiently, exploring him. She shuddered when she felt his fingers slip beneath her shirt and brush over her bare skin. He stroked her belly and higher, the skin of his hands rough against her soft flesh. His thumb brushed the base of her rib cage, making her breath catch.
And then, like so many times before, he stopped, abruptly drawing back. He shifted only inches, but those inches felt like miles, and Violet felt the familiar surge of frustration.
He didn’t say a word; he didn’t have to. Violet understood perfectly. They’d gone too far. Again. But Violet was frustrated, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore her disappointment. She knew they couldn’t play this unsatisfying game forever.
“So you’re going to Seattle tomorrow?” He used the question to fill the rift between them, but his voice shook and Violet was glad he wasn’t totally unaffected.
She wasn’t as quick to pretend that everything was okay, especially when what she really wanted to do was to rip his shirt off and unbutton his jeans.
But they’d talked about this. And, time and time again, they’d decided that they needed to be sure. One hundred percent. Because once they crossed that line…
She and Jay had been best friends since the first grade, and up until last fall that’s all they’d ever been. Now that she was in love with him, she couldn’t imagine losing him because they made the wrong decision.
Or made it too soon.
She decided to let Jay have his small talk. For now.
“Yeah, Chelsea wants to go down to the waterfront and maybe do some shopping. It’s easier to be around her when it’s just the two of us. You know, when she’s not always…on.”
“You mean when she’s not picking on someone?”
“Exactly.”
― Kimberly Derting, quote from Desires of the Dead

“We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.”
― Peter Singer, quote from Animal Liberation

“He made me feel an idiot, even when I knew he was a bigger one than I.”
― Tracy Chevalier, quote from Remarkable Creatures

“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”
― Roald Dahl, quote from My Uncle Oswald

“A lie is like a pet- you have to take care of it, or it'll turn on you and bite you in the ass.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, quote from Heroes Die

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