Top 500 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “When we keep claiming the light, we will find ourselves becoming more and more radiant.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

152. “Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God’s incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

153. “Mourning our losses is the first step away from resentment and toward gratitude. The tears of our grief can soften our hardened hearts and open us to the possibility to say “thanks.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

154. “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 J.M. Nouwen

155. “Who can take away suffering without entering it?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

156. “Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

157. “It’s an incredible mystery of God’s love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

158. “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 J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

160. “Getting answers to my questions is not the goal of the spiritual life. Living in the presence of God is the greater call.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

161. “The real ‘work’ of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

162. “Your heart is greater than your wounds.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

163. “I am deeply convinced that 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 vulnerable self... to enter into a deeper solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success and bring the light of Jesus there.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

164. “Is my growing old making me any closer to Christ? Am I only getting older or am I getting more godly?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

166. “When you have loved deeply, that love can grow even stronger after the death of the person you love. That is the core message of Jesus.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

167. “I realized that healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes, all of creation. In so doing, we become participants in the great battle against the powers of darkness. Our little lives participate in something larger.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

168. “The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

169. “To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives – the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections – that requires hard spiritual work.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

171. “The farther I run away from the place where God dwells, the less I am able to hear the voice that calls me the Beloved, and the less I hear that voice, the more entangled I become in the manipulations and power games of the world.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

172. “Lifting our cup means sharing our life so we can celebrate it. When we truly believe we are called to lay down our lives for our friends, we must dare to take the risk to let others know what we are living.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

174. “Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

176. “Prayer is not what is done by us, but rather what is done by the Holy Spirit in us.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

177. “I wonder if the greatest temptation is self-rejection. Could it be that beneath all the lures to greed, lust, and success rests a great fear of never being enough or not being lovable?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

178. “Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: “These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God’s eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting embrace.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

179. “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 J.M. Nouwen

180. “Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

181. “When I look through God’s eyes at my lost self and discover God’s joy at my coming home, then my life may become less anguished and more trusting.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

182. “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 J.M. Nouwen

183. “The world is evil only when you become its slave.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

184. “You are a Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo, and keep saying that a new world is yet to come.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

185. “This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without condition or limits.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

186. “In God’s eyes the most significant is often the most hidden.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

187. “If God is compassionate, then certainly those who love God should be compassionate as well.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

188. “The goal of spiritual direction is spiritual formation – the ever-increasing capacity to live a spiritual life from the heart. A spiritual life cannot be formed without discipline, practice, and accountability.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

189. “Jesus wants to make it clear that the God of whom he speaks is a God of compassion who joyously welcomes repentant sinners into his house.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

190. “I am beginning to see that much of praying is grieving. This grief is so deep not just because the human sin is so great, but also – and more so – because the divine love is so boundless. To become like the Father whose only authority is compassion, I have to shed countless tears and so prepare my heart to receive anyone, whatever their journey has been, and forgive them from that heart.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

191. “We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

192. “No one person can fulfill all your needs. But the community can truly hold you. The community can let you experience the fact that, beyond your anguish, there are human hands that hold you and show you God’s faithful love.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

193. “The university has become a place that prepares you for the fights in the world.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

194. “This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

195. “We need to remind each other that the cup of sorrow is also the cup of joy, that precisely what causes us sadness can become the fertile ground for gladness.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

196. “He who thinks that he is finished is finished. How true. Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

198. “Life is not entertainment. Life is not distraction.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

199. “Somewhere we know that without silence, words lose their meaning.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

200. “The church is not an institution forcing us to follow rules but a community inviting us to still our hunger and thirst at its table.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen