Top 100 Henri J M Nouwen Quotes
#1. Henri J.M. Nouwen wrote about 'wounded healers.' I've come to see that there's no other kind. We are all wounded, and we are all called to take part in what God is doing to bring healing to those around us.
Mary Lou Redding
#2. it became increasingly clear to me that I know quite well the difference between darkness and light but do not always have the courage to name them by their true names.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#3. There are many elder sons and elder daughters who are lost while still at home.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#4. 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
#5. But when I forget that voice of the first unconditional love, then these innocent suggestions can easily start dominating my life and pull me into the "distant country." It
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#6. The spiritual life is a gift. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit, who lifts us up into the kingdom of God's love. But to say that being lifted up into the kingdom of love is a divine gift does not mean that we wait passively until the gift is offered to us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#7. 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
#8. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#10. The "distant country" is the world in which everything considered holy at home is disregarded.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#11. Loneliness is painful; Solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community ...
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#12. 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
#13. In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#14. On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose, (pp. 49).
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#15. The immense joy in welcoming back the lost son hides the immense sorrow that has gone before. The
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#16. Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#17. Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#18. Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring, and renewing.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#20. When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#21. 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
#22. Jesus, the Son of God, is the man of sorrows, but also the man of complete joy.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#23. Not being welcome is your greatest fear. It connects with your birth fear, your fear of not being welcome in this life, and your death fear, your fear of not being welcome in the life after this. It is the deep-seated fear that it would have been better if you had not lived.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#24. I am convinced that healing is often so difficult because we don't want to know the pain.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#25. 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
#26. Prayer, which is breathing with the Spirit of Jesus, leads us to this immense knowledge.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#27. 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
#29. Here is a home for you; maybe you need us. All my desires to be useful, successful, and productive revolted.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#30. Real care means the willingness to help each other in making our brokenness into the gateway to joy.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. God wants to bring joy not pain, peace not war, healing not suffering. Therefore, instead of declaring anything and everything to be the will of God, we must be willing to ask ourselves where in the midst of our pains and sufferings we can discern the loving presence of God.
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 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
#41. Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity- an illusion! Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you; but you are children of God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#42. Still, as long as you keep pointing to the specifics, you will miss the full meaning of your pain. You will deceive yourself into believing that if the people, circumstances, and events had been different, your pain would not exist. This might be partly true, but
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Dorotheus writes: Don't look for the affection of your neighbor. He who looks for it is troubled when he does not get it. You yourself, however, have to give witness to the love for your neighbor and to offer him rest, and thus you will bring your neighbor to love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#46. Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#47. Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#48. We want to live as people chosen, blessed, and broken, and thus become food for the world.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#49. I wonder if the greatest temptation is self-rejection. Could it be that beneath all the lures to greed, lust, and success rests a great fear of never being enough or not being lovable?
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#50. To console does not mean to take away the pain but rather to be there and say, You are not alone, I am with you. Together
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#51. I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#52. 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
#53. Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#54. 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
#55. Real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common. When
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#56. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3:8 NRSV). To be born of the Spirit is to step into a freedom that we never imagined before. It is to trust that the Spirit
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Dear God,
I am so afraid to open my clenched fists!
Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?
Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?
Please help me to gradually open my hands
and to discover that I am not what I own,
but what you want to give me.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#60. Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#61. Whatever happens to me in life, I must believe that somewhere, In the mess or madness of it all, There is a sacred potential -
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#62. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. The joy at the dramatic return of the younger son in no way means that the elder son was less loved, less appreciated, less favored. The father does not compare the two sons. He loves them both with a complete love and expresses that love according to their individual journeys.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#67. In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding ...
Solitude molds self-righteous people into gentle, caring, forgiving persons who are so deeply convinced of their own great sinfulness and so fully aware of God's even greater mercy that their life itself becomes ministry.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#68. 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
#69. Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are a Devine choice.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I witness many signs of hope. I don't have to wait until all is well, but I can celebrate every little hint of the Kingdom that is at hand.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#74. Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#75. Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#76. 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
#77. They ask only one question: "what is pleasing to the Spirit of God?" And as soon as they have heard the sound of the Spirit in the silence and solitude of their hearts, they follow its promptings even if it upsets their friends, disrupts their environment, and confuses their admirers.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#79. coming home" meant, for me, walking step by step toward the One who awaits me with open arms and wants to hold me in an eternal embrace. I
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#80. One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God's forgiveness.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#81. 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
#82. It wasn't that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the uselessness of my worries and so refocused my whole attention.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#83. Spiritual reading, therefore, is slow, deliberate, meditative reading in which we allow the words to penetrate our heart and question our spirit.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#84. 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.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#85. I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into the passing realities of our short existence in this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God's abode into the dwellings of human beings. I
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#86. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that's quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#90. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#91. Let's dare to enter into an intimate relationship with God without fear, trusting that we will receive love and always more love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#92. Our individual as well as communal lives are so deeply molded by our worries about tomorrow that today hardly can be experienced.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#93. Just as a whole world of beauty can be discovered in one flower, so the great grace of God can be tasted in one small moment Just as no great travels are necessary to see the beauty of creation, so no great ecstasies are needed to discover the love of God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#94. 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 J.M. Nouwen
#95. As Father, the only authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#96. 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
#98. Preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#99. Distance never seperates two hearts that really care, for our memories span the miles and in seconds we are there. But whenever I start feeling sad cuz I miss you I remind myself how lucky I am to have someone so special to miss.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#100. 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
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