Henri Nouwen Quotes

Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.

How do you pray? Take the gospel of each day and spend ten minutes with it. Read it, and read it again. Walk into the world with the gospel in your heart.

God doesn't give us just enough. God gives us more than enough: more bread and fish than we can eat, more love than we dared to ask for.

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.

Prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.

The great call for the Church is to not just be concerned about right or wrong behavior, which is moral life, but about communion with God, which is mystical life.

When we learn to move through suffering, rather than avoid it, then we greet it differently. We become willing to let it teach us. We even begin to see how God can use it for some larger end.

Forgiveness indeed heals memories

Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.

Prayer is the most concrete way to make our home in God.

The great #‎ conversion called for by Jesus is to move from belonging to the world to belonging to God.

The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.

To the degree that we embrace the truth that our identity is not rooted in our success, power, or popularity, but in God's infinite love, to that degree can we let go of our need to judge.

People forget ideas; they don't forget the real presence.

Solitude is an essential element for the spiritual health of a child. If we only stimulate our children - keep them busy with endless stories with no space to be alone - that's not good.

The most important thing I've come to believe in is that people with mental handicaps have a unique mission to bring God's blessing to the World.

I was forced to enter the basement of my soul and look directly at what was hidden there, and to choose, in the face of it all, not death but life.

To receive spiritual direction is to recognize that God does not solve our problems or answer all our questions, but leads us closer to the mystery of our existence where all questions cease.

Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God, here and now.

Asking people for money is giving them the opportunity to put their resources at the disposal of the Kingdom.

The people who most affected me were the ones who got right in there with me, who cried with me, but who also had a certain authority, who dared to say what needed saying.

Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.

Discipline in the spiritual life is the concentrated effort to create the space and time where God can become our master and where we can respond freely to God's guidance.

Life is not entertainment. Life is not distraction.

Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is slowly revealed to us.

The gospel word of the day can become like a painting on the walls. of your inner room, the inner room that is your heart.

Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.

I have found it very important...to let go of my wishes and start hoping.

I choose L'Arche; L'Arche chooses me. I would be dead if I weren't here. I need people to love me and care for me.

As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit.

In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness.

The Church is the body of Christ fashioned by baptism & the Eucharist.

Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world.

It is God’s passionate pursuit of us that calls us to prayer.

The real 'work' of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.

Take prayer with you wherever you go. Say it anytime, and then focus your mind and heart on God.

I always try to turn my personal struggles into something helpful for others.

You are the heir to the Kingdom. Prosperity is your birth right and you hold the key to more abundance in every area of your life then you can possibly imagine.

Obviously a child can never conceive solitude if his parents aren't living it somewhere themselves. I don't mean that to be alone you have to get down on your knees for an hour in a yoga posture.

Good families always ritualize the table. You can say, "This is a Christmas meal; this is a birthday meal."

I feel the problems I have are meant to purify me.

Jesus said Communion first, community comes out of that, and out of community, ministry.

There are as many ways to pray as there are moments in life.

The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.

Prayer is the breath of your life which gives you the freedom to go and stay where you wish and to find the many signs which point out the way to a new land.

As we are involved in unceasing thinking, so we are called to unceasing prayer.

Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)

...the word that seems best to summarize the desire of the human heart is 'communion.' ...wherever we look it is communion that we seek.

By prayer, community is created as well as expressed.

When I was teaching, I didn't feel I had a home, a place where I truly belonged.