Logos Staff
Here are 38 of our favorite John Piper quotes from his influential book, Don’t Waste Your Life.
“God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.”
“Don’t coast through life without a passion.”
“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.”
“Don’t be surprised. There is nothing new under the sun. Only endless repackagings.”
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 Share on X“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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 Share on X 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. —John Piper Share on X“A mind fed daily on TV diminishes.”
“If we try to display the excellence of God without joy in it, we will display a shell of hypocrisy and create scorn or legalism.”
“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.”
“The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature.”
“God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving thing.”
“Not to aim to show God is not to love, because God is what we need the most deeply.”
“The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.”
“The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness.”
“If we only trust Christ to give us gifts and not himself as the all-satisfying gift, then we do not trust him in a way that honors him as our treasure.”
“God without Christ is no God.”
“Seeing and savoring him is the goal of forgiveness.”
“God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring him forever.”
“We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life.”
“Remember, you have one life. That’s all. You were made for God.”
God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is.—John Piper Share on X“There is no point in romanticizing other religions that reject the deity and saving work of Christ. They do not know God. And those who follow them tragically waste their lives.”
“If we desire that there be no boasting except in the cross, then we must live near the cross—indeed we must live on the cross.”
“America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.”
Kirk E. Miller
Joshua Jipp
Michael F. Bird