Jean Vanier - People Quotes

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What people with disabilities want is to relate. This is something unique. It makes people who are closed up in the head become human. The wonderful thing about people with disabilities is that when someone important comes, they don't care. They care about the relationship. So they have a healing power, a healing power of love.

Jean Vanier
People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.

Jean Vanier
Many people confuse authority and the power of efficiency, as if the first role of people with responsibility is to take decisions, command effectively and so exercise power. But their role first of all is to be a person to whom others can turn for help and advice, to provide security, to affirm, to support, to encourage and to guide.

Jean Vanier
The cry for love and communion and for recognition that rises from the hearts of people in need reveals the fountain of love in us and our capacity to give life.

Jean Vanier
In the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts.

Jean Vanier
.. we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. So that, then we go down, what is it that is despicable in ourselves? And there are some elements despicable in ourselves, which we don't want to look at, but which are part of our natures, that we are mortal.

Jean Vanier
Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: "He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community." A community is not an abstract ideal.

Jean Vanier
Somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value. But not just seen — and Aristotle makes a difference between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship.

Jean Vanier
So many in our world today are suffering from isolation, war and oppression. So much money is spent on the construction of armaments. Many, many young people are in despair because of the danger...

Jean Vanier
Communion is mutual trust, mutual belonging; it is the to-and-fro movement of love between two people where each one gives and each one receives. Communion is not a fixed state, it is an...

Jean Vanier
Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy—in fact, the opposite.

Jean Vanier
Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.

Jean Vanier
Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world.

Jean Vanier
Peace can only come as people begin to meet each other. Those that do have the courage to cross the road, however, to look kindly at people and to listen to them with tenderness, will find people much like themselves, people seeking to be loved for who they are. And that it is OK for each one of us to admit, "I don't have all the truth.... I am vulnerable, I am broken. I need help." Then comes the realization, "I need your help. I need your friendship." In the end, what you will find, and what you will help the world to discover, Vanier said, is what it means to be human.

Jean Vanier
In any case, community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bonded to each other, each of whom is a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate.

Jean Vanier
When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.

Jean Vanier
The great thing about people with intellectual disabilities is that they're not people who discuss philosophy... What they want is fun and laughter, to do things together and fool around, and laughter is at the heart of community.

Jean Vanier
To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.

Jean Vanier
Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, 'Beware of the Dog.

Jean Vanier
When we judge, we are pushing people away; we are creating a wall, a barrier. When we forgive we are destroying barriers, we come closer to others.

Jean Vanier
Try and find somebody who is lonely. And when you go to see them, they will see you as the messiah. Go and visit a little old lady who has no friends or family. Bring her flowers. People say 'but that's nothing.' It is nothing—but it's also everything. It always begins with small little things. It all began in Bethlehem. That was pretty small.

Jean Vanier
We are very fragile in front of the future. Accidents and sicknesses is the reality. We are born in extreme weakness and our life will end in extreme weakness. So this, people don't want to hold on to that. They want to prove something. They want security. They want to have big bank accounts and all that sort of stuff. But then also, hold lots of fears within us.

Jean Vanier