Henri Nouwen Quotes

In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call.

~ Henri Nouwen

You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.' It certainly is not easy to hear that voice in a world filled with voices that shout: 'You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody- unless you can demonstrate the opposite.' These negative voices are so loud and so persistent that it is easy to believe them. That's the great trap. It is the trap of self-rejection.

~ Henri Nouwen

The church itself is a spiritual director. It tries to connect your story with God's story. Just to be a true part of this community means you are being directed, you are being guided, you are being asked to make connection. The Bible is a spiritual director. People must read Scripture as a word for themselves personally, and ask where God speaks to them. Finally, individual Christians are also spiritual directors. A spiritual director is a Christian man or woman who practices the disciplines of the church and of the Bible and to whom you are willing to be accountable for your life in God.

~ Henri Nouwen

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

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

~ Henri Nouwen

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

~ 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

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

To learn patience is not to rebel against every hardship.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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