Henri Nouwen Quotes

130 Sourced Quotes

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Henri Nouwen
I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved". Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.

Henri Nouwen
Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.

Henri Nouwen
Often we come home from a sharing session with a feeling that something precious has been taken away from us or that holy ground has been trodden upon.

Henri Nouwen
Prayer requires that we stand in God's presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing. As disciples, we find not some but all of our strength, hope, courage, and confidence in God. Therefore, prayer must be our first concern.

Henri Nouwen
Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is slowly revealed to us.

Henri Nouwen
The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark.

Henri Nouwen
What is forgotten cannot be healed, and that which cannot be healed easily becomes the cause of greater evil.

Henri Nouwen
Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction. He sees that in this nuclear age vast new industrial complexes enable man to produce in one hour that which he labored over for years in the past, but he also realizes that these same industries have disturbed the ecological balance and, through air and noise pollution, have contaminated his own milieu...

Henri Nouwen
When we keep claiming the light, we will find ourselves becoming more and more radiant.

Henri Nouwen
Let's dare to enter into an intimate relationship with God without fear, trusting that we will receive love and always more love.

Henri Nouwen
Any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step....To heal is to let the Holy Spirit call me to dance, to believe again, even amid my pain, that God will orchestrate and guide my life.

Henri Nouwen
From the moment we claim the truth of being the beloved, we are faced with the call to become who we are.

Henri Nouwen
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
There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

Henri Nouwen
Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

Henri Nouwen
Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

Henri Nouwen
Forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing. Forgiveness indeed heals memories...

Henri Nouwen
Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours.

Henri Nouwen
I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.

Henri Nouwen
However, community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.
Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own.
The question, therefore, is not 'How can we make community?' but, 'How can we develop and nurture giving hearts?'

Henri Nouwen
Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.

Henri Nouwen
It is not easy to enter into the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: 'You are my Belived Child, on you my favor rests.'

Henri Nouwen
The crisis of our prayer life is that our minds may be filled with ideas of God while our hearts remain far from him.

Henri Nouwen
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
O Lord, make this Lenten season different from the other ones.
Let me find you again. Amen.

Henri Nouwen
Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know I am moving from fear to love.

Henri Nouwen
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 Nouwen
Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

Henri Nouwen
Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.

Henri Nouwen