TobyMac Quotes

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

A man must himself be cleansed, before cleansing others

Stay in the spiritual fire. Let it cook you.

I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.

Every time I create something, just before that there's a kind of - you're feeling very low, you're feeling very down and insecure. Then you create and then it's fine. This is the way I observe me doing it.

We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through a process of self-purification.

I've learned from personal experience that insecurity and doubting yourself can really hurt you.

Suffering is essential for the elimination of the ego, just as it was necessary for you to scrub and scrub in order to wash the stain from my coat.

Faith shows us that we are never alone. Transformation helps us to love the mystery.

You just do the best you can. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to get worse the more you do it. It can get better, I think... aspects of it, anyway. I mean, I don't write as much as I used to. But I don't do a lot of things as much as I used to. So that's the natural order of things, too. You're more or less living in the present. You're just trying to get that next song, whatever it is. And not think too much about what happened on the last record, or the record you made 20 years ago, because those are over with. Those are done.

The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some) for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system.

You must go into the dark in order to bring forth your light.

I can’t make the Bible come alive for anyone. The Bible is already alive. It makes me come alive.

Love and faith are both a search, a process, it doesn't stay the same; it comes and goes. In some people, it's asleep for a long time and then it wakes up as it evolves.

Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself - some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.

The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but . . . what we are meant to be.

Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."

Now I'm where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven't won at all. Running for my life and never looking back in case there's someone right behind me shoot me down and say he always knew I'd fall. When the crazy wheel slows down where will I be? Back where I started.

When a man's pride is subdued it's like the sides of Mount Aetna. It was terrible during the eruption, but when that is over and the lava is turned into soil, there are vineyards and olive trees which grow up to the top.

In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness.

You have to really swallow your pride and admit that you want to make a comeback. And that means that you weren't at your best and I feel like I stopped being who I needed to be. When I started making this record "Born Villain", I didn't want to be what I used to be but I certainly didn't want to be what I was at the time. I knew that I was supposed to be something better then what I was. I feel that I am close to being what I'm supposed to be and am enjoying what I'm doing here.

Life is an endlessly creative experience, and we are shaping ourselves at every moment by every decision we make.

Through my years as a writer, I've learnt how to simplify the message and pen songs that have a more specific quality - it's not just about my ego and trying to meet girls.

Your life is something opaque, not transparent, as long as you look at it in an ordinary human way. But if you hold it up against the light of God's goodness, it shines and turns transparent, radiant and bright. And then you ask yourself in amazement: Is this really my own life I see before me?