Best quotes by Jon Foreman

MusicIt'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.

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

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

MusicI 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.

LifeLoveFearDarkness 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.

LifeArtI 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.

MusicArtI'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.

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

BeautyMost 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.

BeautyLifeI'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.

BeautyIf 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.

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

BeautyLifeThe 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.

BeautyI 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.

SpeedLifeYou 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 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.

Music will always be judged by our subjective ears.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Music is admitted under the skin without permission.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Stars looking at our planet, watching entropy and pain and maybe startin' to wonder how the chaos in our lives could pass as sane. I've been thinkin' 'bout the meaning of resistance of a world beyond our own and suddenly the infinite and penitent began to look like home.

Please be slow to judge ‘brothers’ who have a different calling.

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.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

We were meant to live for so much more.

The unasked questions are the most dangerous to answer.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The biggest problem facing our world today is a lack of hope and a lack of meaning. [It's] basically just a postmodern world in which there is no right or wrong, no better or worse.

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