Best 119 quotes of Jon Foreman on MyQuotes

I think sometimes we can use spirituality as a vehicle to go closer to the things that frighten us and sometimes we can use it as a shield. I'm guilty of it too. I think spiritual words can do one or the other. Because when I hear people say, in a religion setting, 'Glory,' 'Praise the Lord,' 'Hallelujah,' but it doesn't mean anything, those are actually words that distance us from God, ironically enough.

I think surfing and music are both places of release and self expression where there are no rules, and you can find a different form of freedom that you can't anywhere else.

I think sunrises are rarer for me, but sunset is my favourite time of day.

I think that's a challenge as believers - how do you demonstrate the gospel? How do you do that? I mean it's easy to talk about it and say 'Oh this is what we are supposed to be doing' and this is the relevance. But how do you do that with your hands instead of your mouth? How do you do it every day, instead of just onstage, how is it enacted? And I feel like that is one of the ways that we can show what we believe, by how we treat people around the world.

I think that to believe is to acknowledge that it's a choice in that present tense and that doubt is always an option. You’re not dealing with a fact like one plus one equals two—I’m gonna choose to believe that. It’s kind of one of those things where you are choosing to believe that someone loves you. That is always going to be your choice. So for me, I think that’s what makes the faith that I have volatile and explosive and dangerous and troubling. That’s what most of my songs are about.

I think that we’re a culture that runs away from death, for good reason. Nobody really wants to think about the fact that we’re going to be lifeless food for worms in a coffin someday. But at the same time, I feel like knowing that you’re going to die can be an incredibly rewarding, powerful knowledge. It inspires us to live in ways that we wouldn’t if we were ignorant. I feel like that has inspired me to care about every breath. For me it’s not a morbid curiosity, it’s just wanting to make sure that every moment I have here on the Earth while I am breathing is accounted for.

I try to surf everyday or at least go for a walk on the beach if the waves are flat. The more I travel, the more I appreciate where I live and the ocean.

It’s a good thing my parents named me Jon because that’s what everyone calls me.

It's a great thing to see the strength of simplicity.

It's really hard to fit a complex idea into a 3-minute pop song. And when you're dealing with issues that you're passionate about, usually they have various levels. And within a poem, you can get around the issue of space, and in a song the same way, by simply leaving holes and alluding to what you're talking about.

It was a beautiful letdown, the day I knew, that all the riches this world had to offer me, will never do.

I used to think that great art happened without argument, and maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the things that are most important in this life, you have to fight for.

I use to think that the friction was a bad thing. Everything is to ease pain in our society; pain is very much the enemy. And I don't think that's true. Tension is a good thing. To be pulled tight: that's the only way you can make a proper noise on the guitar or violin.

I usually write from my own experience, and that's definitely a true statement for me. I think having a song about desiring to live and wanting to get it right, which many of my songs do, often I have to clarify that I haven't figured it out yet.

I've always been fascinated with the strong emotional ties that music can have. A song can bring you back to a place or a season of life like no other art form can.

I've experienced more sunrises with my bandmates and friends out on the road than with my wife, because we're always up at these strange times in the mornings trying to catch a plane.

I've got a variety of different sources of news that I follow and every day there's going to be different headlines, different stories spun different ways and different sources that they're going to cite as their facts.

I've never really had a desk job, but I've died one day at a time all over the place.

I’ve never used music to sell my faith and I’ve never used faith to sell my music. I think they are both intrinsic parts of who I am. We’ve always tried to define our music outside of genres…what is a genre? A genre’s a cage or a box and for us our music is best with fangs and some claws running free in the wild.

I want to be a compassionate soul, finding worth and beauty in the worlds around me and within me, attempting to sing a transcendent tune with my temporal position in this life.

I yearn to live and love and burn, and yet so much of my time is spent faking and forgetting, faking and forgetting I carry out my disbelief with uninspired hands, my eyes shut, my emotions dulled, my spirit numb. In times like these I am in desperate need of truth to come to me like a blinding light, like a splinter in my soul, reminding me of the brevity of my time here on earth.

Just as drowning cannot be equated with swimming, mere existence is not the same as abundant life. We have been offered a new way to live – a new way to be human.

Let me know that you hear me, let me know Your touch, let me know that You love me, and let that be enough

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love another.

Life is a battlefield. I don't have enough time on the planet to play games.

Life tears at us and scars us as children so we adopt facades and masks to hide this part of us, to keep this sacred part of ourselves from the pain.

Live rather than talk. Talk is cheap and the tabloids scream about it every day.

Most of the time a spark of beauty or truth will start a fire of a song but fires rarely produce goodness on their own ... you need to control them and put them to work.

Music has always been a location for me to run to, whether it's through someone else's song or my own. I can observe my own planet from this foreign land and things make sense within the telescopic lens of song.

Music is admitted under the skin without permission.

Music is mere tuning a song with words; to some degree you have a beautiful endeavor of cosigning God's blank checks and you're actually co-creating. You're certainly not the creator with the capital C, but you're embarking on an endeavor, you're using the building blocks that have been given to you by the author of time and space.

My best sunsets are always going to be in my home town, San Diego. Watching the sunset from the Pacific knowing that you're sleeping in your own bed, there's something special about that.

My challenge is, do not run away from the hard questions. Truly ask yourself what's worth living for in this life.

My dying planet needs to see what the body of Christ looks like.

My faith, I mean, that's such a personal aspect that a lot of times, of course it's going to come out through the song. But at the same time, I'm not a religious salesman. I feel like God doesn't really need a salesman, and what these songs are are simply my interactions with this life and learning. I guess the bottom line is the songs are really honest, you know what I mean. That faith is going to come through. If the listener is looking for it, that's definitely a part of it.

Our world spins upside down and sometimes we have to lose our grip on the things we value in this life in order to grab on to true life.

Paste just might be my favorite music magazine. They have shed light on many incredible, under-appreciated folks over the years, helping me find new tunes to accompany me through life. We were honored to give a song in return.

Please be slow to judge ‘brothers’ who have a different calling.

Sometimes it can be really hard in our fast paced society to slow ourselves down enough to begin to listen to God's voice. The dilemma exists in my position as well. To be a follower of Christ is to emulate Him. When He went off alone into the desert to pray, He was teaching a valuable lesson.

Sometimes, the best songs are the ones you write without any pen and paper or audio recording device or guitar in your hands. Because there's nothing between you and the melody; it's just a great lyric.

Sometimes the things that hurt are worth the pain.

Stars looking at our planet, watching entropy and pain and maybe startin' to wonder how the chaos in our lives could pass as sane. I've been thinkin' 'bout the meaning of resistance of a world beyond our own and suddenly the infinite and penitent began to look like home.

Surfing and music were incredible outlets for me when I was a kid. And there are some really tricky times when you're growing up and it's easy to make a wrong decision, even with a good family and community around you. Surfing and music kept me out of trouble.

Switchfoot is a surfing term… To switch your feet means to take a new stance facing the opposite direction. It's about change and movement, a different way of approaching life and music.

That's what life is, a continual state of journey. You are a river passing downstream.

The biggest problem facing our world today is a lack of hope and a lack of meaning. [It's] basically just a postmodern world in which there is no right or wrong, no better or worse.

The biggest thing that I've learned is to run the marathon, not the sprint. By that I mean, don't let the little problems that you face in the hour in daily life cast a shadow over the larger joys that you have, over the course of the years.

The easiest thing to do is throw a rock. It's a lot harder to create a stained glass window. I used to get upset at the people who threw rocks but now I'd rather spend my time building the stained glass windows.

The kingdom of heaven is comprised of the broken, the fatherless, the poor, the starving. Nothing that could create good ratings for NBC.

The life, when we're aware of beauty, is kind of a bittersweet thing, it's a transient reminder of eternal beauty, which someday we will be face to face with.