Best Richard Rohr Quotes

#1. The would-be maturing believer is not challenged to any adult faith or service to the world, much less mystical union. Everyone ends up in a muddled middle, where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as William Butler Yeats put it.

Richard Rohr

#2. The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.

Richard Rohr

#3. Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.

Richard Rohr

#4. People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren't.

Richard Rohr

#5. There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.

Richard Rohr

#6. It's not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don't run and report me to the bishop, all right? It's not correct to say that - Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That's different.

Richard Rohr

#7. There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance.

Richard Rohr

#8. Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

Richard Rohr

#9. Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.

Richard Rohr

#10. Your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

Richard Rohr

#11. This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own.

Richard Rohr

#12. The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.

Richard Rohr

#13. The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.

Richard Rohr

#14. It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through.

Richard Rohr

#15. Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything.

Richard Rohr

#16. Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.

Richard Rohr

#17. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

Richard Rohr

#18. When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.

Richard Rohr

#19. Religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

Richard Rohr

#20. The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves - by themselves - and in themselves.

Richard Rohr

#21. Religion is best when it points beyond itself, like Isaiah or John the Baptist. It is worst when it gives you just enough of the forms to inoculate you against the substance, when it substitutes rituals for reality, the container for the contents, the wineskins for the ecstatic wine.

Richard Rohr

#22. If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

Richard Rohr

#23. Someone has said, 'To be a saint is to have loved many things' - many things
the tree, the dog, the sky, the flowers, even the color of someone's clothing.
You see, when you love, you love, and love extends to everything all the time and everywhere.

Richard Rohr

#24. It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

Richard Rohr

#25. The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.

Richard Rohr

#26. Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for the very One who created you.

Richard Rohr

#27. Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point.

Richard Rohr

#28. I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.

Richard Rohr

#29. The important thing is the willingness to give back the gift that is you, not the perfection of the gift itself. Can you feel the difference?

Richard Rohr

#30. most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

Richard Rohr

#31. Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.

Richard Rohr

#32. All mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning.

Richard Rohr

#33. Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

Richard Rohr

#34. I am who I am in the eyes of God-
nothing more and nothing less.

Richard Rohr

#35. God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change.

Richard Rohr

#36. And we must - absolutely must - maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.

Richard Rohr

#37. In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.

Richard Rohr

#38. The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.

Richard Rohr

#39. If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don't turn on music or the TV unless I really need to.

Richard Rohr

#40. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

Richard Rohr

#41. Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter.

Richard Rohr

#42. The very unfortunate result of this preoccupation with order, control, safety, pleasure, and certitude is that a high percentage of people never get to the contents of their own lives!

Richard Rohr

#43. Loving God, allow me to be a sheep at least once in a while, and never let me forget that most of my life I have been a goat.

Richard Rohr

#44. The joyful acceptance of a limited world, of which I am only a small moment and limited part - this is probably the clearest indication of a man in his fullness.

Richard Rohr