Jon Foreman famous quotes

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

#Running #Challenges #Running Away

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Soul #Tunes #World

Hope is not something you can just place in your back pocket or put your fingers around – it’s the belief in a world that has yet to exist.
-- Jon Foreman

#Pockets #World #Belief

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Writing #Guitar

Your story matters, who you are matters, tonight matters, none of it is an accident. You were born for the blue skies.
-- Jon Foreman

#Blue #Sky #Stories

For me songs are born out of the gray space, the things I don't fully understand, the things that I can't put in my pocket.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Space #Pockets

Sometimes the things that hurt are worth the pain.
-- Jon Foreman

#Hurt #Pain #Sometimes

I began thinking about the idea of a 24 hour concert. What if you tied songs to certain hours of the day - creating a 24 hour world of lyric and melody. So that was the inspiration for this project.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Inspiration #Thinking

Eventually everything fails me, but when I look at the sunset or the sky, I'm reminded what it's like to be alive.
-- Jon Foreman

#Sunset #Sky #Looks

I like to write on airplanes... that forced meditation time when you have nothing else to do, so your mind is allowed to go to places it wouldn't otherwise go.
-- Jon Foreman

#Writing #Airplane #Meditation

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Believe #Mean #Thinking

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Fire #Needs

When our world falls apart and we have no more faces to wear - that’s when it’s beautiful, and that’s when we change.
-- Jon Foreman

#Beautiful #Fall #Our World

Pain is a common emotion in many of my songs mainly because I often don't know other ways to express it adequately. In my songs I wrestle with the things that I don't understand.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Pain #Way

If it doesn't break your heart it isn't love
-- Jon Foreman

#Heart #Break #Break Your Heart

I often use music as a handle for very emotionally explosive substances: love, sex, God, fear, doubt, politics, the economics of the soul - these are daunting thoughts in the back of my mind that I rarely visit without the safety gloves of song.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Sex #Safety

Happiness is like peeing in your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you can feel the warmth.
-- Jon Foreman

#Pants #Feels #Warmth

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Art #Strong

Entropy is one of the laws of thermodynamics. It's a physical law that says everything in nature is moving from order to disorder. In our lives this same principle is at work. As time moves on, things break down as we make mistakes. This is the 'letdown' every person experiences because of sin. For Christians this concept doesn't end there because we realize God's 'beautiful' mercy and grace restores the order in our lives.
-- Jon Foreman

#Beautiful #Christian #Mistake

There are certain songs that I like to listen to at certain times of the day. For example, first thing in the morning I love listening to "Flamenco Sketches" off of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Morning #Blue

I'm learning how much I have to learn, how little I know, how fragile my understanding is. I'm learning to be thankful and patient; today is all that we will ever have in this life. If we spend our time obsessing with the future or regretting the past then we will never live. Tomorrow will always be tomorrow and yesterday cannot be changed. The wise man seeks God in the now and brings both his regrets and fears before Him. The freedom that we are offered is truly amazing: to live, today, free from even our own fallen desires. This is where I want to be.
-- Jon Foreman

#Wise #Regret #Past

For me, I want to create a environment for the songs to live in. So one song by itself only tells a piece of the story, but in the context of the album, more of the colors are revealed.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Color #Albums

If you truly love someone, you're going to be pure because true love comes from God, and God tells us to remain pure. That's good enough for me.
-- Jon Foreman

#Good Enough #Enough #If You Truly Love Someone

There’s nothing that you can sell me that can make me happy.
-- Jon Foreman

#Make Me Happy

Hope is not a substitute for pain. Hope is in spite of pain.
-- Jon Foreman

#Pain #Substitutes #Spite

Jesus Christ's mercy and power indwells us and gives us the strength to make a positive difference.
-- Jon Foreman

#Jesus #Differences #Giving

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Children #Pain #Tears

Being a creator of a song I get to take all these broken fragments of failure and chaos and weave together something beautiful and meaningful. Decay. Death. Pain. Fall. And if God is a songwriter then these fallen leaves of mine can be redeemed
-- Jon Foreman

#Beautiful #Meaningful #Song

There is a deeper portion of our being that we rarely allow others to see. Call it a soul maybe, this is the place that holds the most value. All else can drift but this. When this dies our body has no meaning.
-- Jon Foreman

#Soul #Body #Portions

If we truly believe in an all-powerful God, then there's going to be beauty and truth to be found in all sorts of different places.
-- Jon Foreman

#Powerful #Believe #Different

Usually for me, the melodic structures come out in the water and the lyrical ideas could come from a book I'm reading.
-- Jon Foreman

#Book #Reading #Ideas

The shadow proves the sunshine.
-- Jon Foreman

#Sunshine #Shadow #Prove

Music will always be judged by our subjective ears.
-- Jon Foreman

#Ears #Judged

The tendency in today's culture is to want to be a 'star', but I want to be a servant.
-- Jon Foreman

#Stars #Culture #Want

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Beach #Ocean #Appreciate

I’m really only responsible to make sure that one person is clapping at the end of my life. Because I feel like as a performer, a lot of times you live for everyone else’s applause. That’s a dangerous thing within the church or outside the church.
-- Jon Foreman

#Church #That One Person #Responsible

Experience is all I have. I equate song-writing with archeology. Every day you dig. You dig into different places within yourself - even finding places that you've rarely been. And buried within the soil is song.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Writing #Different

What do we really want to say to the world? Three main themes. The inability to find completion in our modern society, the inability to find completion within ourselves, and the new way to be human in what Christ offers us - His love and His perfect plan of redemption for us.
-- Jon Foreman

#Perfect #Inability #Three

I look for places where there's no one out on the water. I'd rather surf a wave to myself than fight a crowd.
-- Jon Foreman

#Fighting #Water #Looks

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Religious #Mean

I am often tempted to think of success in terms that are defined by others: records sold, popularity gained, album reviews, etc. These are impossible demands, however, and they can never be satisfied. Letting finite others define our worth is a horrible way to live. Only the Infinite Other [God] has the authority to do this.
-- Jon Foreman

#Thinking #Albums #Records

IF YOU APPROACH THE WORLD WITH THE APRON OF A SERVANT,THEN YOU ARE ALLOWED TO GO PLACES THAT YOU CAN'T GO IF YOU APPROACH IT WITH THE CROWN OF A KING
-- Jon Foreman

#Kings #Crowns #World

Celebrity is a currency with an exchange rate almost as strong as anonymity.
-- Jon Foreman

#Strong #Currency #Rate

Nothing stays together without a fight.
-- Jon Foreman

#Fighting #Together

I simply want the music to to find its way to open-minded people.
-- Jon Foreman

#People #Want #Way

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Our World #Order #True Life

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Growing Up #Kids #Community

Greed, envy, sloth, pride and gluttony: these are not vices anymore. No, these are marketing tools. Lust is our way of life. Envy is just a nudge towards another sale. Even in our relationships we consume each other, each of us looking for what we can get out of the other. Our appetites are often satisfied at the expense of those around us. In a dog-eat-dog world we lose part of our humanity.
-- Jon Foreman

#Dog #Pride #Envy

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Running #Song #Land

The beauty of what I read in the gospel is the intimacy of what we're called to, that there's no middle man.
-- Jon Foreman

#Men #Intimacy #Middle

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Running #Thinking #Who I Am

For me, even if I'm not a fan of the band in general or maybe it's not the style of music I want to put on for my daughter and me when we're waking up in the morning, there's always something that I can learn from it. And I think those are the things that are surprising.
-- Jon Foreman

#Daughter #Morning #Thinking

Music is what I do; Christ is why I do it.
-- Jon Foreman

#Christ #Music Is

There are a lot of similarities between music and surfing. There's a rhythm to both of them and with sound waves and ocean waves, you see patterns, plus the breathing is all part of it.
-- Jon Foreman

#Ocean #Breathing #Surfing

There’s a time to be silent - to build up a reason to sing again.
-- Jon Foreman

#Silent #Reason

As far as when I'm writing a song, I think I'm writing first and foremost for myself.
-- Jon Foreman

#Song #Writing #Thinking

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.
-- Jon Foreman

#Thinking #Self #Expression