Henri Nouwen famous quotes

Our life is full of brokenness - broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God's faithful presence in our lives.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Broken #Expectations #Faithful

One of the remarkable qualities of the story is that it creates space. We can dwell in a story, walk around, find our own place. The story confronts but does not oppress; the story inspires but does not manipulate. The story invites us to an encounter, a dialogue, a mutual sharing. As long as we have stories to tell to each other there is hope. As long as we can remind each other of the lives of men and women in whom the love of God becomes manifest, there is reason to move forward to new land in which new stories are hidden.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Moving #Men #Land

Our glory is hidden in our pain, if we allow God to bring the gift of himself in our experience of it.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Pain #Glory

This is what life is about. It is being sent on a trip by a loving God, who is waiting at home for our return and is eager to watch the slides we took and hear about the friends we made. When we travel with the eyes and ears of the God who sent us, we will see wonderful sights, hear wonderful sounds, meet wonderful people ... and be happy to return home.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Home #Eye #Sight

When you have loved deeply, that love can grow even stronger after the death of the person you love. That is the core message of Jesus.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Jesus #Stronger #Messages

To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Christian #Needs #Relevant

It's an incredible mystery of God's love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Brother #Mystery #Incredibles

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Love Life #People #Temptation

As long as we relate to the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the fields and the oceans as properties which we can manipulate according to our real or fabricated needs, nature remains opaque, and does not reveal to us its true being.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Nature #Real #Ocean

The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Self #Rejection #Meaningful Life

The spiritual life is a life beyond moods. It is a life in which we choose joy and do not allow ourselves to become victims of passing feelings of happiness or depression.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Joy #Feelings

Real grief is not healed by time... if time does anything, it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us. Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so present that we take it for granted. Therefore, it is only in retrospect - or better, in memory - that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Pain #Memories #Real

In this crazy world, there's an enormous distinction between good times and bad, between sorrow and joy. But in the eyes of God, they're never separated. Where there is pain, there is healing. Where there is mourning, there is dancing. Where there is poverty, there is the kingdom.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Encouragement #Pain #Crazy

Ministers are tempted to join the ranks of those who consider it their primary task to keep other people busy … But our task is the opposite of distraction … how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Opposites #Voice #People

Life is a gift, not to possess, but to share.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Joy #Life Is #Life Is A Gift

Why is it important that you are with God and God alone on the mountain top? It's important because it's the place in which you can listen to the voice of the One who calls you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the One who calls you 'my beloved daughter,' 'my beloved son,' 'my beloved child.' To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice resound in your whole being.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Daughter #Prayer #Children

Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Love #Loss #Hatred

You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Inspirational #Thinking #Way

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Heart #Thinking #Mind

When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Pain #Expression #Despair

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Life #Peace #Freedom

Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Happiness #Opportunity #Choices

If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning...and ask yourself whether this situation is truly God given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain. To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you. The more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Pain #Loneliness

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Gratitude #Hurt #Grateful

Gratitude flows from the recognition that who we are and what we have are gifts to be received and shared.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Gratitude #Who We Are #Flow

Each day holds a surprise. But only if we expect it can we see, hear, or feel it when it comes to us. Let's not be afraid to receive each day's surprise, whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy It will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Heart #Joy #Humanity

Pay attention to the people God puts in your path if you want to discern what God is up to in your life.
-- Henri Nouwen

#People #Pay #Path

When we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Inspiration #Forgiving #Offensive

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Lonely #Hurt #Pain

God wants you to live for others and to live that presence well.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Want #Wells

Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking our words more seriously and discovering their true selves.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Self #Waiting #Feelings

This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Opportunity #Deep Love #Giving

A few years ago I met an old professor at the University of Notre Dame. Looking back on his long life of teaching, he said with a funny wrinkle in his eyes: I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Teaching #Eye #Wrinkles

We have to keep asking ourselves: 'What does it all mean? What is God trying to tell us? How are we called to live in the midst of all this?' Without such questions our lives become numb and flat.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Mean #Trying #Doe

The pain that comes from deep love makes your love more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Pain #Deep Love #Roots

Precisely where I feel my poverty is where I discover God's blessing.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Blessing #Poverty #Feels

Our lives are unique stones in the mosaic of human existence -- priceless and irreplaceable.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Unique #Stones #Mosaics

I am beginning now to see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find him, but instead as the one who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding...
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Character #Journey

Our greatest fulfillment lies in giving ourselves to others.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Lying #Compassion #Giving

All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day all lived with a promise in their hearts that guided them toward the future without the need to know exactly what it would look like. Let's live with hope.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Jesus #Suicidal

The world is evil only when you become its slave.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Evil #World #Slave

The joy that compassion brings is one of the best-kept secrets of humanity. It is a secret known only to a very few people, a secret that has to be rediscovered over and over again.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Compassion #People #Joy

Compassion- which means, literally, "to suffer with"- is the way to the truth that we are most ourselves, not when we differ from others, but when we are the same. Indeed the main spiritual question is not, "What difference do you make?" but "What do you have in common?" It is not "excelling" but "serving" that makes us most human. It is not proving ourselves to be better than others but confessing to be just like others that is the way to healing and reconciliation.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Healing #Mean

The dance of life finds its beginnings in grief......Here a completely new way of living is revealed. It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Pain #Grief #Grieving

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Eye #Heart #Compassion

Life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Life #Life Is #Possession

The real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others?
-- Henri Nouwen

#Real

A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identifiction, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Life #Lonely #Distance

I know that I have to move from speaking about Jesus to letting him speak within me, from thinking about Jesus to letting him think within me, from acting for and with Jesus to letting him act through me. I know the only way for me to see the world is to see it through his eyes.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Jesus #Moving #Eye

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Mean #Space

For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity. You need not look at that only in a negative way. You wanted to give your heart to others, and you did so quickly and easily. But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you. You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Letting Go #Heart #Self

Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Mean #Men #Space

In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Happiness #Lonely #Memories

Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Waiting #Periods

My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Complaining #Whole Life #Interruptions

Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Self #Purification #True Self

The more we touch the intimate love of God which creates, sustains, and guides us, the more we recognize the multitude of fruits that come forth from that love.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Fruit #God Love #Intimate

We need to be angels for each other, to give each other strength and consolation. Because only when we fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Angel #Giving #Joy

His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Heart #Two #Tasks

Emit gratitude as though it was done
-- Henri Nouwen

#Gratitude #Done

The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Men #Order #Waiting

Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Joy #Darkness

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told.  We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Stories #May #Want

While optimism makes us live as if someday soon things will soon go better for us, hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present, with the deep trust that God will never leave us alone but will fulfill the deepest desires of our heart... Joy in this perspective is the fruit of hope.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Heart #Perspective #Optimism

Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life...all of our life.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Beautiful #Kissing #People

People who have known the joy of God point each other to flashes of light here and there, and remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real Presence of God. They discover that there are people who heal each other's wounds, forgive each other's offenses, share their possessions, foster the spirit of community, celebrate the gifts they have received, and live in constant anticipation of the full manifestation of God's Glory.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Real #Light #People

We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for.
-- Henri Nouwen

#People #Broken #Needs

God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful and painful.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Painful #Moments #Joyful

A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Lonely #Quiet

Real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Strong #Real #Humble

Once we deeply trust that we ourselves are precious in God's eyes, we are able to recognize the preciousness of others and their unique places in God's heart.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Heart #Eye #Unique

The real enemies of our life are the 'oughts' and the 'ifs.' They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and now.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Real #Past #Enemy

The life-converting experience is not the discovery that I have choices to make that determine the way I live out my existence, but the awareness that my that my existence itself is not in the center. Once I 'know' God, that is, once I experience God's love as the love in which all my human experiences are anchored, I can desire only one thing: to be in that love.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Discovery #Choices #Desire

The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? but: Are you in love with Jesus?
-- Henri Nouwen

#Christian #Jesus #Prayer

We seldom realize fully that we are sent to fulfill God-given tasks. We act as if we were simply dropped down in creation and have to decide to entertain ourselves until we die. But we were sent into the world by God, just as Jesus was. Once we start living our lives with that conviction, we will soon know what we were sent to do.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Jesus #Tasks #World

Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Deep Love

Our life is...a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Sadness #Kissing #Joy

Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Christian #People #Giving

The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Gratitude #Discipline #Joy

The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Christian #Prayer #Heart

I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Son #Unconditional Love #Found

The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. God loves us, not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Christian #Self #Leader

We are all healers who can reach out and offer health, and we are all patients in constant need of help.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Needs #Helping #Patient

Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love. Here we see what compassion means. It is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position; it is not a reaching out from on high to those who are less fortunate below; it is not a gesture of sympathy or pity for those who fail to make it in the upward pull. On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Jesus #Home #Mean

In God's eyes the most significant is often the most hidden.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Eye #Significant

The church is not an institution forcing us to follow rules but a community inviting us to still our hunger and thirst at its table.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Community #Church #Tables

Peace is first of all the art of being.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Art #Complacency #Firsts

To be baptized means to make the passage with the people of Israel and with Jesus from slavery to freedom and from death to new life. It is a commitment to a life in and through Jesus.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Jesus #Mean #Commitment

He who thinks that he is finished is finished. How true. Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Thinking #Goal #Saint

To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, welcome, to accept.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Listening #Needs #Speech

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Friendship #Grief #Healing

However, community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another. Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own. The question, therefore, is not 'How can we make community?' but, 'How can we develop and nurture giving hearts?'
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Heart #Giving

Dare to love and to be a real friend. The love you give and receive is a reality that will lead you closer and closer to God as well as those whom God has given you to love.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Love #Real #Giving

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Men #Thinking #Desert

Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Spiritual #Self #Listening

Forgiveness changes the way we remember.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Way #Remember

Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Knowing #Joy

Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support. Life and death are connected by vulnerability. The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives. Let's not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life during the times we are powerful, successful, and popular.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Children #Powerful #Mean

That is our vocation: to convert the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.
-- Henri Nouwen

#Sisterhood #Space #Fearless

Lord Jesus, master of both the light and the darkness, send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas. We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence. We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light. To you we say, 'Come Lord Jesus!'
-- Henri Nouwen

#Jesus #Heart #Light