Top 500 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The real ‘work’ of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

152. “A spiritual life without discipline is impossible. Discipline is the other side of discipleship. The practice of a spiritual discipline makes us more sensitive to the small, gentle voice of God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

166. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

168. “By inviting God into our difficulties we ground life – even its sad moments – in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves. And we learn the way to a deeper love for others.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

173. “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

174. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

176. “Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved’. Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

177. “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

178. “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

179. “We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

181. “God wants to bring joy not pain, peace not war, healing not suffering. Therefore, instead of declaring anything and everything to be the will of God, we must be willing to ask ourselves where in the midst of our pains and sufferings we can discern the loving presence of God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

192. “People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness. They point each other to flashes of light here and there, and remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real presence of God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

193. “I was forced to enter the basement of my soul and look directly at what was hidden there, and to choose, in the face of it all, not death but life.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

194. “The pain that comes from deep love makes your love more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

195. “A prayerful life is not a life in which we say many prayers, but a life in which nothing, absolutely nothing, is done, said, or understood independently of him who is the origin and purpose of our existence.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

196. “I trust in you, Lord, but keep helping me in my moments of distrust and doubt.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

197. “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

198. “Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

199. “One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

200. “Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen