Richard Rohr Quotes

The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.

~ Richard Rohr

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

~ Richard Rohr

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

~ Richard Rohr

The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.

~ Richard Rohr

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.

~ Richard Rohr

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

~ Richard Rohr

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

~ Richard Rohr

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

~ Richard Rohr

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.

~ Richard Rohr

Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority.

~ Richard Rohr

True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.

~ Richard Rohr

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.

~ Richard Rohr

I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once.

~ Richard Rohr

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

~ Richard Rohr

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.

~ Richard Rohr

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

~ Richard Rohr

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.

~ Richard Rohr

Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power.

~ Richard Rohr

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

~ Richard Rohr

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

~ Richard Rohr

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

~ Richard Rohr

If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal list, you can let go of the irritations on the small lists of time. Ultimate security allows you to suffer small insecurity without tremendous effort. If you are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far out you can fly and not get lost.

~ Richard Rohr

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.

~ Richard Rohr

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

~ Richard Rohr

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better.

~ Richard Rohr

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

~ Richard Rohr

If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.

~ Richard Rohr

When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.

~ Richard Rohr

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

~ Richard Rohr

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

~ Richard Rohr

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

~ Richard Rohr

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

~ Richard Rohr

The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time.

~ Richard Rohr

If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.

~ Richard Rohr

Seventy times seven is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

~ Richard Rohr

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.

~ Richard Rohr

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

~ Richard Rohr

If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.

~ Richard Rohr

The ego hates losing – even to God.

~ Richard Rohr

A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.

~ Richard Rohr