Top 100 Henri Nouwen Quotes
#1. As we are involved in unceasing thinking, so we are called to unceasing prayer.
Henri Nouwen
#2. I have always felt that if I am very personal and connected with what I myself am living, my writing will transcend ecclesial boundaries.
Henri Nouwen
#3. 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
#4. In their poverty, the mentally handicapped reveal God to us and hold us close to the gospel.
Henri Nouwen
#5. Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.
Henri Nouwen
#6. I am deeply convince that the necessity of prayer, and to pray unceasingly, is not as much based on our desire for God as on God's desire for us. It is God's passionate pursuit of us that calls us to prayer.
Henri Nouwen
#7. It is precisely in times of spiritual dryness that we must hold on to our spiritual discipline so that we can grow into new intimacy with God.
Henri Nouwen
#8. 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
#9. As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God's voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through our words.
Henri Nouwen
#10. 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
#11. Joy and laughter are the gifts of living in the presence of God and trusting that tomorrow is not worth worrying about.
Henri Nouwen
#12. 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
#13. Prayer is not what is done by us, but rather what is done by the Holy Spirit in us.
Henri Nouwen
#14. This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.
Henri Nouwen
#15. We must ask ourselves how many times others would benefit more from our silence than from our words.
Henri Nouwen
#16. We cannot make it rain but we can see to it that the rain falls on prepared soil.
Henri Nouwen
#17. In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of, you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That's a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community.
Henri Nouwen
#18. Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world.
Henri Nouwen
#19. If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.
Henri Nouwen
#20. Life is a gift to be grateful for and not a property to cling to.
Henri Nouwen
#21. One of the main tasks of theology is to find words that do not divide but unite, that do not create conflict but unity, that do not hurt but heal.
Henri Nouwen
#22. I really believe that what we finally want is to know God, as God has come to be known through Jesus. Knowledge is knowledge of the heart - the Spirit - I would say. It is the Spirit in us who reveals God.
Henri Nouwen
#23. Active waiting means present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.
Henri Nouwen
#24. The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don't see the results.
Henri Nouwen
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others
Henri Nouwen
#28. 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
#29. Peacemaking is a full-time vocation that includes each member of God's people.
Henri Nouwen
#30. 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
#31. Forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing. Forgiveness indeed heals memories ...
Henri Nouwen
#32. Ministry is the least important thing. You cannot not minister if you are in communion with God and live in community.
Henri Nouwen
#33. Community means that people come together around the table, not just to feed their bodies, but to feed their minds and their relationships.
Henri Nouwen
#34. The great teachers are always those who can live the tension. They are not criticizing everybody, they're not complaining. They give young people a vision.
Henri Nouwen
#35. 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
#36. As peacemakers, we must resist all the powers of war and destruction and proclaim that peace is the divine gift offered to all who affirm life. Resistance means saying 'No' to all the forces of death, wherever they may be.
Henri Nouwen
#37. What is important is how well we love. God will make our
love fruitful, whether we see that fruitfulness or not.
Henri Nouwen
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Once you are in communion with God, you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear other people in whom God has also found a dwelling place.
Henri Nouwen
#41. I have an increasing sense that the most important crisis of our time is spiritual and that we need places where people can grow stronger in the spirit and be able to integrate the emotional struggles in their spiritual journeys.
Henri Nouwen
#42. If you start with community and want to be faithful to community, you have to realize that what binds you together is not mutual compatibility or common tasks, but God. In order to stay in touch with that call to community, we always have to return to solitude.
Henri Nouwen
#43. The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark.
Henri Nouwen
#44. Which questions guide our lives? Which questions do we make our own? Which questions deserve our undivided and full personal commitment? Finding the right questions is crucial to finding the answers.
Henri Nouwen
#45. To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer.
Henri Nouwen
#46. The central question is, Are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God's presence, to listen to God's voice, to look at God's beauty, to touch God's incarnate Word and to taste fully God's infinite goodness.
Henri Nouwen
#47. We are called to be fruitful - not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness.
Henri Nouwen
#48. Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.
Henri Nouwen
#49. The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. This image shows a tension, a desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear.
Henri Nouwen
#50. 'How much longer will I live?' ... Only one thing seems clear to me. Every day should be well-lived. What a simple truth! Still, it is worthy of my attention.
Henri Nouwen
#51. If we want other people to give us something that only God can give, we become a demon. We say, "Love me!" and before you know it we become violent and demanding and manipulative. It's so important that we keep forgiving one another - not once in a while, but every moment of life.
Henri Nouwen
#52. Is my growing old making me any closer to Christ? Am I only getting older or am I getting more godly?
Henri Nouwen
#53. The spiritual life is a reaching out to our innermost self, to our fellow human and to our God.
Henri Nouwen
#54. 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
#55. In a strange way the spiritual life isn't "useful" or "successful." But it is meant to be fruitful. And fruitfulness comes out of brokenness.
Henri Nouwen
#57. Your life is not going to be easy, and it should not be easy. It ought to be hard. It ought to be radical; it ought to be restless; it ought to lead you to places you'd rather not go.
Henri Nouwen
#58. Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing.
Henri Nouwen
#59. 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.
Henri Nouwen
#60. 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
#61. 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.
Henri Nouwen
#62. Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.
Henri Nouwen
#63. Those who keep speaking about the sun while walking under a cloudy sky are messengers of hope, the true saints of our day.
Henri Nouwen
#64. 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
#65. Community is where humility and glory touch.
Henri Nouwen
#66. I am very grateful that I am in touch with so many different church groups. I am always very moved by the fact that so many people - practically over the spectrum of the Christian world - are responding to my writing.
Henri Nouwen
#67. We need to remind each other that the cup of sorrow is also the cup of joy, that precisely what causes us sadness can become the fertile ground for gladness.
Henri Nouwen
#68. Where true inner freedom is, there is God. And where God is, there we want to be.
Henri Nouwen
#69. To live in the present, we must deeply believe that what is most important is in the here and now.
Henri Nouwen
#70. I can choose to grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly.
Henri Nouwen
#71. When we give generously, with an abundance mentality, what we give away will multiply.
Henri Nouwen
#72. Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.
Henri Nouwen
#73. Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.
Henri Nouwen
#74. Fundraising is a very rich and beautiful activity. It is a confident, joyful and hope-filled expression of ministry. In ministering to each other, each from the riches that he or she possesses, we work together for the full coming of God's Kingdom.
Henri Nouwen
#75. Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?-are not questions with an answer but questions that open us up to new questions which lead us deeper into the unshakeable mystery of existence.
Henri Nouwen
#76. When we break bread and give it to each other, fear vanishes and God becomes very close.
Henri Nouwen
#77. I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.
Henri Nouwen
#78. Prayer is the most concrete way to make our home in God.
Henri Nouwen
#79. 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
#80. That's the temptation of the devil: "Turn stones into bread! Be relevant!"
Henri Nouwen
#81. God, help me to see others not as enemies or as ungodly but rather as thirsty people. And give me the courage and compassion to offer your Living Water, which alone quenches deep thirst.
Henri Nouwen
#82. No one person can fulfill all your needs. But the community can truly hold you. The community can let you experience the fact that, beyond your anguish, there are human hands that hold you and show you God's faithful love.
Henri Nouwen
#83. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.
Henri Nouwen
#84. Perhaps nothing helps us make the movement from our little selves to a larger world than remembering God in gratitude. Such a perspective puts God in view in all of life, not just in the moments we set aside for worship or spiritual disciplines. Not just in the moments when life seems easy.
Henri Nouwen
#85. Gratitude flows from the recognition that who we are and what we have are gifts
to be received and shared.
Henri Nouwen
#86. The real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others?
Henri Nouwen
#87. The only feelings that do not heal are the ones you hide.
Henri Nouwen
#88. The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be.
Henri Nouwen
#89. Spiritual maturity is not knowing what to do with your whole life, but just knowing what to do next.
Henri Nouwen
#90. If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives.
Henri Nouwen
#91. What once seemed such a curse has become a blessing. All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love.
Henri Nouwen
#92. Living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness.
Henri Nouwen
#93. If you are not able to be silent, you will not be able to speak well.
Henri Nouwen
#94. In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness.
Henri Nouwen
#95. Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.
Henri Nouwen
#96. One of the most beautiful ways for spiritual formation to take place is to let your insecurity lead you closer to the Lord. Natural hypersensitivity can become an asset; it makes you aware of your need to be with people and it allows you to be more willing to look at their needs.
Henri Nouwen
#97. I trust in you, Lord, but keep helping me in my moments of distrust and doubt.
Henri Nouwen
#98. I still believe that the university is a place where people can develop their minds and learn skills, but also they can develop their personalities and their spiritual life.
Henri Nouwen
#99. Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don't receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy.
Henri Nouwen
#100. Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.
Henri Nouwen
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