Top 500 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “We seem to have a fear of empty spaces. The philosopher Spinoza called this a horror vacui. We want to fill up what is empty. Our lives stay very full. And when we are not blinded by busyness, we fill our inner space with guilt about things of the past or worries about things to come.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

209. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

211. “Your unique presence in your community is the way God wants you to be present to others. Different people have different ways of being present. You have to know and claim your way. That is why discernment is so important. Once you have an inner knowledge of your true vocation, you have a point of orientation. That will help you decide what to do and what to let go of, what to say and what to remain silent about, when to go out and when to stay home, who to be with and who to avoid.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

212. “When we face death with hope, we can live life with generosity.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

213. “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

214. “Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

215. “The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? but: Are you in love with Jesus?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

216. “Drinking the cup of life is fully appropriating and internalizing our own unique existence, with all its sorrows and joys. It is not easy to do this. For a long time we might not feel capable of accepting our own life; we might keep fighting for a better or at least a different life.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

217. “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 J.M. Nouwen

218. “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 J.M. Nouwen

219. “There is within you a lamb and a lion. Spiritual maturity is the ability to let lamb and lion lie down together.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

220. “I am less likely to deny my suffering when I learn how God uses it to mold me and draw me closer to him. I will be less likely to see my pains as interruptions to my plans and more able to see them as the means for God to make me ready to receive him. I let Christ live near my hurts and distractions.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

221. “When you get exhausted, frustrated, overwhelmed, or run down, your body is saying that you are doing things that are none of your business. God does not require of you what is beyond your ability, what leads you away from God, or what makes you depressed or sad.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

222. “God is always active in our lives. He always calls, he always asks us to take up our crosses and follow him. But do we see, feel, and recognize God’s call, or do we keep waiting for that illusory moment when it will really happen? Displacement is not primarily something to do or to accomplish but something to recognize.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

223. “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 J.M. Nouwen

224. “Let’s dare to enter into an intimate relationship with God without fear, trusting that we will receive love and always more love.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

225. “It is not easy to enter into the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: ‘You are my Belived Child, on you my favor rests.’”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

226. “There is nothing so important in the family as the sacred quality of the meal.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

227. “Joy never denies the sadness, but transforms it to a fertile soil for more joy.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

228. “Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

229. “Unlike a fairy tale, the parable provides no happy ending. Instead, it leaves us face to face with one of life’s hardest spiritual choices: to trust or not to trust in God’s all-forgiving love.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

230. “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 J.M. Nouwen

231. “While my friend always spoke about the sun, I kept speaking about the clouds, until one day I realized that it was the sun that allowed me to see the clouds.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

232. “When we approach fundraising in a spirit of gratitude, our confidence in our mission does not depend on how the person we are with responds to our request! We are free to remain secure in God’s love with our hearts set joyfully on the kingdom.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

233. “The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

234. “Both trust and gratitude require the courage to take risks because distrust and resentment, in their need to keep their claim on me, keep warning me how dangerous it is to let go of my careful calculations and guarded predictions.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

235. “The crisis of our prayer life is that our minds may be filled with ideas of God while our hearts remain far from him.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

236. “That is our vocation: to convert the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

238. “Marriage is not that two people love each other so much that they can find God in each other, but that God loves them so much that they can discover each other as living reminders of God’s presence.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

239. “I know that the fact that I am always searching for God, always struggling to discover the fullness of Love, always yearning for the complete truth, tells me that I have already been given a taste of God, of Love and of Truth. I can only look for something that I have, to some degree, already found. How can I search for beauty and truth unless that beauty and truth are already known to me in the depth of my heart?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

240. “If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

241. “Those who do not run away from our pains but touch them with compassion bring healing and new strength. The paradox indeed is that the beginning of healing is in the solidarity with the pain. In.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

242. “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

243. “I now see that the hands that forgive, console, heal, and offer a festive meal must become my own.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

244. “I still believe that the university is a place where people can develop their minds and learn skills, but also they can develop their personalities and their spiritual life.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

245. “The real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

246. “Silence is a very concrete, practical, and useful discipline in all our ministerial tasks. It can be seen as a portable cell taken with us from the solitary place into the midst of our ministry. Silence is solitude practiced in action.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

247. “Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one’s own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but do not know how.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

248. “Our tendency is to run from the painful realities or try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

249. “By prayer, community is created as well as expressed.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

250. “Community has little to do with mutual compatibility. Similarities in educational background, psychological make-up, or social status can bring us together, but they can never be the basis for community. Community is grounded in God, who calls us together, and not in the attractiveness of people to each other. There.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen