Jon Foreman Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Your faith is what you do daily, you can't separate your heart from your body and keep them both alive, they're almost the same thing.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing stays together without a fight.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I want to thrive not just survive

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

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.

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 think that's the beauty of live music - creating from the destruction.

I think despair and cynicism are two different things. On the flip side of hope is despair. Belief and doubt are the same thing, in that to believe something you have to actively doubt the opposite. And from my perspective, that's the deep end. You're dealing with the unknown; you're dealing with mystery.

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

Music is admitted under the skin without permission.

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.

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

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.

Grace? Undeserved kindness? Blessings? Whatever we call it, I'm pretty sure we get doses of luck more than we'll ever know.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

Hope is not a substitute for pain. Hope is inspite of pain.

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

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.

There's a certain amount of humility that is attached to wonder, and a certain amount of pride attached to knowledge and I think the moment you say 'we know beyond a shadow of a doubt this exists', you can't have faith that it exists. Faith is no longer possible. So faith is only possible when doubt is possible. Faith is only possible when humility and wonder is possible. And I feel like the musical world of humility and wonder is a much wider door to enter into than the narrow confines of epistemology and things like knowledge and these really narrow boxes. That's kind of where our songs are… [those are] the worlds our songs are trying to explore.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

I'm not so sure that home is a place you can still get to by train.

Love alone is worth the fight

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.

If you're leaving your family behind, you better believe in what you're singing.

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

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

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.

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.

Without honesty, art is dead.

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.

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

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.

There's nothing that you can sell me that can make me happy.

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 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.