Henri J.M. Nouwen

Quotes

• “We may be little, insignificant servants in the eyes of a world motivated by efficiency, control and success. But when w...”
• “Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to shar...”
• “Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner dispositio...”
• “Prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart; that is, at that point of our being where there ar...”
• “The return to the "Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name" allows me to let my dad be no less than the good, lov...”
• “While optimism makes us live as if someday soon things will soon go better for us, hope frees us from the need to predic...”
• “Solitude is very different from a ’time-out’ from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows...”
• “Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an en...”
• “I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Be...”
• “When we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without...”
• “[Praying] demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yo...”
• “solitude begins with a time and a place for God, and God alone. If we really believe not only that God exists but also t...”
• “To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to become free to be compassionate...”
• “No matter the life-shattering circumstance that delivers the devastating blow to our spirit, God is bigger. He is faithf...”
• “I am called to enter into the inner sanctuary of my own being where God has chosen to dwell. The only way to that place ...”
• “the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.To gently push asid...”
• “Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporad...”
• “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...”
• “A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situatio...”
• “If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouqu...”
• “Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a w...”
• “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...”
• “It wasn't that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the uselessness of my worries and...”
• “A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this...”
• “Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome...”
• “Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led into places where we would rathe...”
• “Jesus changes our history from a random series of sad incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity for a change o...”
• “When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.”
• “The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.”
• “a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.”
• “Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.”
• “In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.”
• “The world is evil only when you become its slave.”