49 Graceful Quotes

Grace can be a powerful force, often overlooked in the hustle and bustle of daily life. It's the quiet strength that allows us to navigate challenges, the gentle touch that soothes a troubled heart, and the elegance that leaves an indelible mark on everyone we encounter. Whether you're seeking a bit of inspiration, a moment of reflection, or a touch of poetic elegance, our curated collection of the top 49 graceful quotes is here to offer you a taste of profound wisdom and serene beauty. Dive in and discover how grace can elevate your spirit and enrich your soul.

1. “Butterflies are self propelled flowers.” - Robert A. Heinlein

2. “ . . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.” - Marilynne Robinson

3. “We should get jerseys, cause we make a good team; but yours would look better than mine, cause you're outta my league.” - Relient K

4. “As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.” - Anne Lamott

5. “Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.” - Flannery O'Connor

6. “And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.' Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.” - Brennan Manning

7. “Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions.” - Brennan Manning

8. “Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.If you reject the ragamuffin gospel and turn your back on Christianity, do so because you find the answers of Jesus incredible, blasphemous, or hopelessly hopeful.” - Brennan Manning

9. “A family in my sister's neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this IS grace.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

10. “He, who thought it necessary to maintain himself in her good graces, strove to console her under her disappointment by committing a little violence upon truth.” - Matthew Lewis

11. “Not being changed by prayer is sort of life standing in the middle of a spring rain without getting wet. It's hard to stand in the center of God's acceptance and love without getting it all over you.” - Steve Brown

12. “Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.” - Robert Farrar Capon

13. “But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.” - Robert Farrar Capon

14. “Yes, he said, taking her hand. And now I think I finally understand that old expression - a sight for sore eyes.” - Justin Somper

15. “But I know how much you care for me. I read it in the ribbon. Lorcan sighed. Did you really need to read the ribbon to know that I cared for you?, he said. Really, Grace, don't you know me at all?I thought I did, she said” - Justin Somper

16. “Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.” - John Piper

17. “With each opportunity before me, God presented me with a choice. I could accept His offerings, His wisdom, His grace. Or I could choose to hold onto the pain, the anger and the resentment a little longer.” - Sharon E. Rainey

18. “It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.” - Robert Goolrick

19. “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.” - Paul Hawken

20. “Grace under pressure.” - Ernest Hemingway

21. “I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.” - Anne Lamott

22. “Remember!--It is Christianity to do good always--even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity to love our neighbours as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to show that we love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything. If we do this, and remember the life and lessons of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act up to them, we may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in peace.” - Charles Dickens

23. “Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us.” - Paul Murray

24. “I’m not thrilled. And I totally reserve the right to angst over all this later. But honestly, Mom? Right now, I’m so happy to see you that I wouldn’t care if you’re secretly a ninja sent from the future to destroy kittens and rainbows.” - Rachel Hawkins

25. “Kind of just existed from day to day, on weird plateau of feeling nothingness.” - Cat Clarke

26. “I choose to suppress the initial categories I want to put people in - rich, poor, together, not together, druggie, yuppie, rocker, loser, winner, cool, uncool. I choose to remember that I don't know their struggle or their pain. I choose to err on the side of grace because someday I'll stand before God, and I pray He'll err on the side of grace with me.” - Jud Wilhite

27. “I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself.” - Maggie Stiefvater

28. “The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.” - Robert Farrar Capon

29. “Jesus was victorious not because he never flinched, talked back, or questioned, but having flinched, talked back, and questioned, he remained faithful.” - Brennan Manning

30. “Okay, don't get mad." She pulled out my stake --- or at least something that looked like my stake,only the hilt of it was now covered in bright blue crystals and diamond-like gems."You Bedazzled my stake?""Um ... Surprise," April said, "Just because you're hunting nasty stuff doesn't mean you can't do it in style.” - Bree Despain

31. “The greatness of the man's power is the measure of his surrender.” - William Booth

32. “God can't clean the house of you when you're still in it.” - Anne Lamott

33. “God has made us to be conduits of his grace. The danger is in thinking the conduit should be lined with gold. It shouldn't. Copper will do.” - John Piper

34. “Grace is the first and last moving cause of salvation; and faith, essential as it is, is only an important part of the machinery which grace employs. We are saved 'through faith,' but salvation is 'by grace'.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

35. “The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us. The mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering son, and the artist when he or she is drawing attention to grace, by showing the pinprick of light overcoming the darkness in the painting, or the story, or the song. The world knows darkness. Christ came into the world to show us light. I have seen it, have been blinded by it, invaded by it. I will tell its story.” - Andrew Peterson

36. “Let today be the day you learn the grace of letting go and the power of moving on.” - Steve Maraboli

37. “Grace saved my life; it can revolutionize yours.” - Jay Bakker

38. “I assigned him to help me trim the Brussels sprouts, but instead he kept trying to throw them away when he thought I wasn’t looking. “Brussels sprouts, Grace, really? These are our friends. Why are you doing this to them?” - Alice Clayton

39. “What is "grace"? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed, outside of Him there is nothing, and whatever exists exists by His free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness.” - Thomas Merton

40. “Please Julian,” she whispered to him as he slept beside her. “Don’t leave me.” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

41. “The ones whose light will remain with me long after they have burnt out are the ones that had grace. Because it's rare that the gift comes with grace. Some of the biggest arseholes I've ever met are the most gifted. Because it's "pretty girl" syndrome. Being gifted is like being born beautiful. You don't have to work a day in a year in your life for it. You were born with it. In one sense, it's like blue blood, money, gift, or beauty. They are the things that should make you the most humble, because they are not the things you have earned. They are the things you were given. Yet, it is my experience that they male people the most spoiled. And the people who work the hardest, and who have overcome the most obstacles on their life, who have reason to beat their breasts are the most humble, sometimes. I can't get over that. it's bewildering to me. To make it through success and still have manners, to still have curiosity, intellectual curiosity, to still have some grace, to keep your dignity, that is really... rare.” - Bono

42. “Got plans for the rest of the day?"I looked back at him and my heart just stopped. Then it just started again thudding erratically. What the hell does that mean? I feel like I'm having a heart attack."No plans," I whispered. Test drive your mattress? Let me pretend to be a Skittle and you can taste my rainbow? Fifty Shades me? Please! Oh, holy horror, I'm freaking losing it.” - Christine Zolendz

43. “Do you know whether or not you are in God's grace?Joan: If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” - Joan of Arc

44. “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.” - Terrence Malick

45. “Oh goodness infinite, goodness immense!That all this good of evil shall produce,And evil turn to good; more wonderfulThan that which by creation first brought forthLight out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand,Whether I should repent me now of sinBy me done, and occasioned; or rejoiceMuch more, that much more good thereof shall spring;To God more glory, more good-will to menFrom God, and over wrath grace shall abound.” - John Milton

46. “To be convinced in our hearts that we have forgiveness of sins and peace with God by grace alone is the hardest thing.” - Martin Luther

47. “My past life is abundantly full of God’s mercy, and, above all sin, stands the forgiving love of the Crucified.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

48. “On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka “nested dolls” that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)” - Philip Yancey

49. “No matter how many sins you make or how slow you travel back toward God's valley, you are still way ahead of a person who never made a mistake and doesn't know what it is like to climb out of a pit of shame and rise above their temptations.” - Shannon L. Alder