Henri Nouwen Quotes

Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.

- Henri Nouwen

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

- Henri Nouwen

Each day holds a surprise. But only if we expect it can we see, hear, or feel it when it comes to us. Let's not be afraid to receive each day's surprise, whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy It will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity.

- Henri Nouwen

One of the main tasks of theology is to find words that do not divide but unite, that do not create conflict but unity, that do not hurt but heal.

- Henri Nouwen

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

- Henri Nouwen

Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.

- Henri Nouwen

To learn patience is not to rebel against every hardship.

- Henri Nouwen

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 Nouwen

Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

- Henri Nouwen

Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.

- Henri Nouwen

Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.

- Henri Nouwen

Just as people can watch spellbound a circus artist tumbling through the air in a phosphorized costume, so they can listen to a preacher who uses the Word of God to draw attention to himself. But a sensational preacher stimulates the senses and leaves the spirit untouched. Instead of being the way to God, his 'being different' gets in the way.

- Henri Nouwen

I have an increasing sense that the most important crisis of our time is spiritual and that we need places where people can grow stronger in the spirit and be able to integrate the emotional struggles in their spiritual journeys.

- Henri Nouwen

Ministers are powerless people who have nothing to boast of except their weaknesses. But when the Lord whom they serve fills them with His blessing they will move mountains and change the hearts of people wherever they go.

- Henri Nouwen

Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.

- Henri Nouwen

For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved.

- Henri Nouwen

Perhaps nothing helps us make the movement from our little selves to a larger world than remembering God in gratitude. Such a perspective puts God in view in all of life, not just in the moments we set aside for worship or spiritual disciplines. Not just in the moments when life seems easy.

- Henri Nouwen

The evangelical movement has become just a bit victimized by a success-oriented culture, wanting the church - like the corporation - to be successful.

- Henri Nouwen

The spiritual life is not a life before, after, or beyond our everyday existence. No, the spiritual life can only be real when it is lived in the midst of the pains and joys of the here and now.

- Henri Nouwen

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.

- Henri Nouwen

As peacemakers, we must resist all the powers of war and destruction and proclaim that peace is the divine gift offered to all who affirm life. Resistance means saying 'No' to all the forces of death, wherever they may be.

- Henri Nouwen

Our inclination is to show our Lord only what we feel comfortable with. But the more we dare to reveal our whole trembling self to him, the more we will be able to sense that his love, which is perfect love, casts out all our fears.

- Henri Nouwen

To be a minister means above all to become powerless, or in more precise terms, to speak with our powerlessness to the condition of powerlessness which is so keenly felt but so seldom expressed by the people of our age.

- Henri Nouwen

Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.

- Henri Nouwen

The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. This image shows a tension, a desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear.

- Henri Nouwen

In solitude we become aware that we were together before we came together and that life is not a creation of our will but rather an obedient response to the reality of our being united.

- Henri Nouwen

In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.

- Henri Nouwen

When we have nothing to cling to as our own and cease thinking of ourselves as people who must defend privileges, we can open ourselves freely to others with the faithful expectation that our strength will manifest itself in our shared weakness.

- Henri Nouwen

Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.

- Henri Nouwen

Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.

- Henri Nouwen

The real enemies of our life are the 'oughts' and the 'ifs.' They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and now.

- Henri Nouwen

To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer.

- Henri Nouwen

The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

- Henri Nouwen

The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.

- Henri Nouwen

The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don't see the results.

- Henri Nouwen

God wants you to live for others and to live that presence well.

- Henri Nouwen

Asking people for money is giving them the opportunity to put their resources at the disposal of the Kingdom.

- Henri Nouwen

In their poverty, the mentally handicapped reveal God to us and hold us close to the gospel.

- Henri Nouwen

Our first responsibility in the midst of violence is to prevent it from destroying us.

- Henri Nouwen

If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.

- Henri Nouwen

When you recognize the festive and the still moments as moments of prayer, then you gradually realize that to pray is to live.

- Henri Nouwen

Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.

- Henri Nouwen

To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.

- Henri Nouwen

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. God loves us, not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love.

- Henri Nouwen

God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful and painful.

- Henri Nouwen

One of the most beautiful ways for spiritual formation to take place is to let your insecurity lead you closer to the Lord. Natural hypersensitivity can become an asset; it makes you aware of your need to be with people and it allows you to be more willing to look at their needs.

- Henri Nouwen

Our efforts to disconnect ourselves from our own suffering end up disconnecting our suffering from God's suffering for us. The way out of our loss and hurt is in and through.

- Henri Nouwen

Jesus didn't say, 'Blessed are those who care for the poor.' He said, 'Blessed are we where we are poor, where we are broken.' It is there that God loves us deeply and pulls us into deeper communion with himself.

- Henri Nouwen

'How much longer will I live?'... Only one thing seems clear to me. Every day should be well-lived. What a simple truth! Still, it is worthy of my attention.

- Henri Nouwen

The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.

- Henri Nouwen

The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.

- Henri Nouwen

Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.

- Henri Nouwen

Ministry is the least important thing. You cannot not minister if you are in communion with God and live in community.

- Henri Nouwen

A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.

- Henri Nouwen

I've had a tremendous problem with depression in my life. I'd rather not talk about it, because it's over. But depression is real.

- Henri Nouwen

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

- Henri Nouwen

Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.

- Henri Nouwen

Peacemaking is a full-time vocation that includes each member of God's people.

- Henri Nouwen

Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.

- Henri Nouwen

The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.

- Henri Nouwen

Our glory is hidden in our pain, if we allow God to bring the gift of himself in our experience of it.

- Henri Nouwen

Prayer is the most concrete way to make our home in God.

- Henri Nouwen

People with handicaps teach me that being is more important than doing, the heart is more important than the mind, and caring together is better than caring alone.

- Henri Nouwen