Top 100 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes
#1. Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#2. Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#3. The real mystery of marriage is not that husband and wife love each other so much that they can recognize God in each other's lives, but more because God loves them so much that they can discover each other more and more as living reminder's of God's presence.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#4. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#5. But human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process, because it forces us to face directly our own condition in all its beauty as well as misery.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#6. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#7. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#8. Every time you close another door - be it the door of immediate satisfaction, the door of distracting entertainment, the door of busyness, the door of guilt and worry, or the door of self-rejection - you commit yourself to go deeper into your heart and thus deeper into the heart of God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#9. Spiritual formation is not about steps or stages on the way to perfection. It's about the movements from the mind to the heart through prayer in its many forms that reunite us with God, each other, and our truest selves.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#10. Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it. You discard it because you are fixed on receiving it from the same person to whom you gave it.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#11. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#12. Birthdays need to be celebrated. i think it is more important to celebrate a birthday than a successful exam or promotion or a victory. because to celebrate a birthday means to say to someone "thank you for being you".
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#13. Every Christian is constantly invited to overcome his neighbor's fear by entering into it with him, and to find in the fellowship of suffering the way to freedom.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#14. When people show you their boundaries ("I can't do this for you") you feel rejected ... part of your struggle is to set boundaries to your own love. Only when you are able to set your own boundaries will you be able to acknowledge, respect and even be grateful for the boundaries of others.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#15. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#16. You can only seek God when you have already found God. The desire for God's unconditional love is the fruit of having been touched by that love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#17. when God created man and woman in his own image, he saw that "it was very good," and, despite the dark voices, no man or woman can ever change that.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#18. Humility is in reality the opposite of self-deprecation. It is the grateful recognition that we are precious in God's eyes and that all we are is pure gift.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#19. One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God's forgiveness.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#21. ...when we listen to the Spirit, we hear a deeper sound, a different beat. ...Living a spiritually mature life requires listening to God's voice within and among us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#22. As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#23. I am convinced that healing is often so difficult because we don't want to know the pain.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#24. Jesus, the Son of God, is the man of sorrows, but also the man of complete joy.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#25. Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one's own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but do not know how.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#26. Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring, and renewing.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#27. Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#28. The immense joy in welcoming back the lost son hides the immense sorrow that has gone before. The
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#29. Many consumerist economies stay afloat by manipulating the low self-esteem of their consumers and by creating spiritual expectations through material means.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#31. Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#32. Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#33. I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#34. We want to live as people chosen, blessed, and broken, and thus become food for the world.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#35. Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#36. God looks at his people as children of a family who are happy that those who have done only a little bit are as much loved as those who accomplish much.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#37. The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation ...
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#38. 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.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#39. 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.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#40. When we see ourselves in a relationship of love with God, there is always something of a lover's dilemma, a struggle to give and receive, to trust and obey the call.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#41. When the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#42. No matter the life-shattering circumstance that delivers the devastating blow to our spirit, God is bigger. He is faithful and unchanging, merciful and consistent with His offer to us, that through it all, we will be comforted, we will be loved, we will be HELD.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#43. Lifting our cup means sharing our life so we can celebrate it. When we truly believe we are called to lay down our lives for our friends, we must dare to take the risk to let others know what we are living.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#45. Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: Who can take away suffering without entering it?
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#46. Coming home and staying there where God dwells, listening to the voice of truth and love, that was, indeed, the journey I most feared because I knew that God was a jealous lover who wanted every part of me all the time. When would I be ready to accept that kind of love?
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#47. Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#48. In the midst of a turbulent, often chaotic, life we are called to reach out, with courageous honesty to our innermost self, with relentless care to our fellow human beings, and with increasing prayer to our God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#49. Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#50. truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder than giving it.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#51. When we are alone with God, the Spirit prays in us. The challenge is to develop a simple discipline or spiritual practice to embrace some empty time and empty space every day.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#52. When we face death with hope, we can live life with generosity.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#53. Unlike a fairy tale, the parable provides no happy ending. Instead, it leaves us face to face with one of life's hardest spiritual choices: to trust or not to trust in God's all-forgiving love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#54. Both trust and gratitude require the courage to take risks because distrust and resentment, in their need to keep their claim on me, keep warning me how dangerous it is to let go of my careful calculations and guarded predictions.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#55. Becoming like the heavenly Father is not just one important aspect of Jesus' teaching, it is the very heart of his message.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#56. A large part of the father's life had been spent waiting. He could not force his younger son to come home or his older son to let go of his resentments. Only they themselves could take the initiative to return.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#57. I will see great things when I am willing to be seen. I will receive new eyes that see the mysteries of GOd's own life, but only when I allow God to see me, all of me, even those parts that I myself do not want to see.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#58. Christ invites us to remain in touch with the many sufferings of every day and to taste the beginning of hope and new life right there, where we live amid our hurts and pains and brokenness.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#59. We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#60. When love chooses, it chooses with a perfect sensitivity for the unique beauty of the chosen one, and it chooses without making anyone else feel excluded.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#61. To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to become free to be compassionate. Compassion can never coexist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#62. Thus the authority of compassion is the possibility of man to forgive his brother, because forgiveness is only real for him who has discovered the
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#63. Community thus is obedience practiced together. The question is not simply, "Where does God lead me as an individual person who tries to do his will?" More basic and more significant is the question, "Where does God lead us as a people?" This
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#64. I also learned afresh that friendship requires a constant willingness to forgive each other for not being Christ, and a willingness to ask Christ himself to be the true center of the relationship.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#65. When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#66. The real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.
To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing
that demands real effort.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#68. God should be sought, but we cannot find God. We can only be found by him.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#69. Jesus, of course, had this capacity to see truly. For example, Saint John tells us, "Jesus did not want to entrust himself to them because he knew what was in every heart" (John 2:24). Such intuitive and perceptive knowledge is the nature of discernment.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#70. God is there. God's light is there. God's forgiveness is there. God's boundless love is there.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#71. Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led into places where we would rather not go.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#72. We need you to be a father who can claim for himself the authority of true compassion.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#73. One of the tragedies of our life is that we keep forgetting who we are
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#74. What I do know with unwavering certainty is the heart of the father. It is a heart of limitless mercy.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#75. It is as if we have been wandering in a foreign land looking for peace and purpose in our lives and a true sense of who we are. Jesus stands in our midst and beckons us home so that we can be restored to our true selves.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#76. It is hard for me to imagine what it means to be a complete foreigner, a person to whom no one shows any sign of recognition.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#77. I reached a healthy place in which I was able to stop projecting my needs on another human being. We both came to understand that each of us is limited in our capacity to be for another what is needed, and learned to forgive each other for not being God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#78. Jesus.. says, 'Let go of your complaints, forgive those who loved you poorly, step over your feelings of being rejected, and have the courage to trust that you won't fall into an abyss of nothingness but into the safe embrace of a God whose love will heal all your wounds.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#80. Today worrying means to be occupied and preoccupied with many things, while at the same time being bored, resentful, depressed, and very lonely.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#81. Today I personally believe that while Jesus came to open the door to God's house, all human beings can walk through that door, whether they know about Jesus or not. Today I see it as my call to help every person claim his or her own way to God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#82. [Praying] demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your [fellow human]. This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#83. When you can look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or you sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#84. We are called to witness, always with our lives and sometimes with our words, to the great things God has done for us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#85. God loves us before any human person can show love to us. He loves us with a "first" love, an unlimited, unconditional love, wants us to be his beloved children, and tells us to become as loving as himself.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#86. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#87. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#88. When I look through God's eyes at my lost self and discover God's joy at my coming home, then my life may become less anguished and more trusting.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#89. The farther I run away from the place where God dwells, the less I am able to hear the voice that calls me the Beloved, and the less I hear that voice, the more entangled I become in the manipulations and power games of the world.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#91. Death is not the total dissolution or our identity but the way to its fullest revelation.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#92. There is within you a lamb and a lion. Spiritual maturity is the ability to let lamb and lion lie down together.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#93. Where does my complete flowering as a human being connect with the needs of the world?
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#94. It is hard to bear with people who stand still along the way, lose heart, and seek their happiness in little pleasures which they cling to ... You feel sad about all that self-indulgence and self-satisfaction, for you know with an indestructible certainty that something greater is coming.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#95. By inviting God into our difficulties we ground life - even its sad moments - in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves. And we learn the way to a deeper love for others.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#96. To be bored, therefore, does not mean that we have nothing to do, but that we question the value of the things we are so busy doing. The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#97. Jesus wants to make it clear that the God of whom he speaks is a God of compassion who joyously welcomes repentant sinners into his house.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#98. This man welcomes sinners and eats with them," Jesus confronted the Pharisees and scribes not only with the return of the prodigal son, but also with the resentful elder son. It must have come as a shock to these dutiful religious people.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#99. Remember, you are held safe. You are loved. You are protected. You are in communion with God and with those whom God has sent you. What is of God will last. It belongs to the eternal life. Choose it, and it will be yours.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#100. As the beloved son, I have to claim my full dignity and begin preparing myself to become the father.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
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