Jon Foreman quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me, the good songs are the ones that come really naturally. There are certain songs that you rework and rewrite and the craft becomes very evident, but a lot of times those aren't my favorite songs. The favorite songs are the ones that I can't even hear my own voice in.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Anything worth doing in this world is incredibly difficult to do.

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

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.

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.

Faith, hope, and love remain. But the greatest of these is love.

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

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

I do have an obligation, however, a debt that cannot be settled by my lyrical decisions. My life will be judged by my obedience, not my ability to confine my lyrics to this box or that.

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. But when life hands you hurricanes, you go surfing.

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

I love a good pop song. I have no problem with the concept of doing that sort of thing. For me, it's usually what I'm inspired by, what I'm thinking about.

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.

From the shore, the ocean is forever. It's a beautiful, dangerous place. Music is tied to the sea, born from the struggle, looking for hope. Because hope belongs in the dark places.

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 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.

I don't think we can solve the outside problems until we solve the ones within.

For me, when I think about Christ, I think about this iconoclastic man who lived and died for the broken. And the paramount underdog, which is basically turning the world on it's head. Blessed are the poor and blessed are the hungry, blessed are the broken, all these things that feel very backwards in our fame, power, beauty, riches hungry world. That's who Christ is to me.

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

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.

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.

Darkness cannot cast out darkness. You need a light for that. Fear cannot cast out fear. You're gonna need hope for that death warrants more death. But I believe life wants more life and I'm convinced that the greatest weapon we've got is LOVE! And maybe, in a world full of fighters, in a world imploding with hate, maybe to be a lover, you gotta be a fighter. Maybe that's the biggest fight, the only fight worth fighting, the fight you're gonna be in for the rest of your 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.

I think of myself as more of a lover rather than a fighter, but sometimes you have to fight for what you love.

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

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.

All music is worship. It just depends on what you're worshipping.

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.

Sometimes the things that hurt are worth the pain.

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.

C.S. Lewis says that fiction is able to sneak past the watchful dragons of religion. It becomes more powerful to speak in poetry.

Don't be discouraged, but know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance brings character, and character brings hope, and this is a hope which will not disappoint us.

In my opinion, the best way of showing someone the best way to live life is by living it.

If you can have a couple of tight friends that you can tell things to, that you can say, 'Hey, this is what I'm struggling with,' and then pray and talk about it, then that's an incredible thing.

Calling has this weight that somehow we think that your calling is fixed. That your calling is this line that you've finally found and now you're on that track and that's what you're gonna do forever and maybe that's the case. But I feel like calling has much more to to do with the moment that you're in.

Every day of your life, you change the world. Absolutely, yes, we're out to change the world. I mean, you change it whether you like it or not. You wake up and you talk to the grocer. You either kick your dog or you pet him. There's a million decisions you have every day where you change the world.

The shadow proves the sunshine.

I look around and I know there's a lot in the world that I want to see changed - and I want to be a part of something bigger than myself. I want to see things change, in myself as much as in the world around me.

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.

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

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.

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.

Maybe truth is not something that I can possess. Maybe truth is something which possesses me.

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

If it doesn't break your heart it isn't love

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

Nothing stays together without a fight.

Music is what I do; Christ is why I do it.

I'm always thinking about songs, I'm thinking of life maybe a little bit more lyrically than a computer programmer or someone like that.

I have horrible acting ability. I can only be one thing and that's it. So for better, for worse, that's all I've got to offer is me. I've got nothing else.

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.

Hope is not a substitute for pain. Hope is in spite of pain.

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.

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.

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

There's a time to be silent - to build up a reason to sing again.

You want songs to sound cohesive with the other songs on the record but when you first start writing you just want to write to tell the truth.

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

I feel like that's something the church has done really badly is actually confessing. We are sinners. We are broken, shattered people that do things selfishly, out of arrogance, pride, lust, greed. And all have fallen short. That doesn't mean some we're definitely a part of that inclusive all.

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 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'm very reluctant to put my words into God's mouth.

I wanna be a part of the generation that throws out money, throws out time, throws out all that we are against something bigger than ourselves.

What you do with your life is ascribing more to what you invest your time in. If you spend a lot of time on your phone, you're ascribing more worship to that. Anything can become, by that definition, some form of idol or deity or ultimate worth in your life.

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.

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.

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

I try to write songs just for the song itself. I don't try and think about where it's going to end up, that way you're writing for the good of the song.

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.

We were meant to live for so much more,

I love the idea that you can create a world through song.

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

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.

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'm continually wrestling with the idea that there are certain things in this world that simply don't fit. The idea that I have this longing for beauty and truth, and yet I'm also attracted to things that are very dark the lies that exist within me and outside of me.

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.

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.

The unasked questions are the most dangerous to answer.

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

Think deeply about life, it's worth it!

The truth will set you free, but it's only slightly less scary than hell and a whole lot harder to get there.

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.

The song can be a little bit more of the mystery and leave the whole thing open ended. But there's something really gratifying about saying exactly what you mean.

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

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

Why is it that everything is collapsing if gravity is pulling us together?

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.

Music is a handshake where I, as a songwriter, am only part of the equation. I love that, the fact that you can make the song your own.

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.

I'm always looking to find order within the chaos. And sometimes when my life gets fairly chaotic, I'll take a walk outside. I think about the order and the perfection of galaxies of planets in orbit and traveling around space and thinking how chaotic the wars and divorces and riots on our planet must look from outer space.

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.

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.

You wake up, you wake up, another day, you wake up, you wake up, traffic still moving at the same speed, our eyes looking at the same speed, our minds thinking at the same speed, I wanna see movement, I wanna see change. I wanna wake up for real. I wanna wake up. I wanna wake up. We were meant to live.

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

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.

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.

When I'm happy, when I'm enjoying life, I'm home, I'm surfing, I'm spending time with my wife, my friends and I'm not thinking about the pain. And then the moment I encounter something that feels difficult, I feel like that's when, for me, I turn to writing and thinking and maybe a song comes from that.

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

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'm not really one to be on camera, I'd rather be writing songs.

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

Inside all of us, we know the truth of life that there's something more than the next new cell phone or gadget or relationship and that our heart beats in time with the sunset.

Well, the funny thing is, you are never the same person that you were the day before.