Top 500 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Yes, it’s a competitive world, but where is your heart?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

252. “Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else. Let’s be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

253. “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

254. “I can choose to grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

255. “Which questions guide our lives? Which questions do we make our own? Which questions deserve our undivided and full personal commitment? Finding the right questions is crucial to finding the answers.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

256. “Community thus is obedience practiced together. The question is not simply, “Where does God lead me as an individual person who tries to do his will?” More basic and more significant is the question, “Where does God lead us as a people?” This.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

257. “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

258. “In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

259. “The word listen in Latin is audire. If we listen with full attention in which we are totally geared to listen, it’s called ob-audire, and that’s where the word obedience comes from. Jesus is the obedient one. That means he is total ear, totally open to the love of God. And if we are closed, and to the degree that we are closed, we are surdus. That is the Latin word for deaf. The more “deaf” we get, the more absurdus.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

260. “I can only be healed from above, from where God reaches down. What is impossible for me is possible for God. “With God, everything is possible.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

261. “The parable that Rembrandt painted might well be called “The Parable of the Lost Sons.” Not only did the younger son, who left home to look for freedom and happiness in a distant country, get lost, but the one who stayed home also became a lost man. Exteriorly he did all the things a good son is supposed to do, but, interiorly, he wandered away from his father. He did his duty, worked hard every day, and fulfilled all his obligations but became increasingly unhappy and unfree.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

262. “I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

263. “I want my work to create space where people can meet God, rather than give them something they can “apply” to their daily life.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

264. “Your life is not going to be easy, and it should not be easy. It ought to be hard. It ought to be radical; it ought to be restless; it ought to lead you to places you’d rather not go.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

265. “Your community needs you, but maybe not as a constant presence. Your community might need you as a presence that offers courage and spiritual food for the journey, a presence that creates the safe ground in which others can grow and develop, a presence that belongs to the matrix of the community. But your community also needs your creative absence.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

266. “Ministers are powerless people who have nothing to boast of except their weaknesses. But when the Lord whom they serve fills them with His blessing they will move mountains and change the hearts of people wherever they go.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

267. “I always try to turn my personal struggles into something helpful for others.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

268. “As we are involved in unceasing thinking, so we are called to unceasing prayer.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

269. “There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

270. “Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

271. “One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

272. “God does not love the younger son more than the elder. In the story the father goes out to the elder son just as he did to the younger, urges him to come in, and says, “My son, you are with me always, and all I have is yours.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

273. “It is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

274. “Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

275. “God wants you to live for others and to live that presence well.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

276. “Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the fullest in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

277. “To be bored, therefore, does not mean that we have nothing to do, but that we question the value of the things we are so busy doing. The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

278. “God’s compassion is described by Jesus not simply to show me how willing God is to feel for me, or to forgive me my sins and offer me new life and happiness, but to invite me to become like God and to show the same compassion to others as he is showing to me.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

279. “Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock, and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free gifts.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

280. “People we meet, some great in the eyes of the world and some almost invisible to the larger society, are often conduits of God’s wisdom.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

281. “A happy life is a life for others.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

282. “God is the father who watches and waits for his children, runs out to meet them, embraces them, pleads with them, begs and urges them to come home.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

283. “Prayer, which is breathing with the Spirit of Jesus, leads us to this immense knowledge.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

284. “The main problem of service is to be the way without being “in the way.” And if there are any tools, techniques and skills to be learned they are primarily to plow the field, to cut the weeds and to clip the branches, that is, to take away the obstacles for real growth and development.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

285. “Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led into places where we would rather not go.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

286. “Writing is not just a job. It helps me to pray. It’s a way of being.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

287. “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

288. “I am convinced that healing is often so difficult because we don’t want to know the pain.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

289. “We may have only a few talents, but we have many gifts. Our gifts are the many ways in which we express our humanity. They are part of who we are: friendship, kindness, patience, joy, peace, forgiveness, gentleness, love, hope, trust and many others. These are the true gifts we have to offer to each other.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

290. “Community as discipline is the effort to create a free and empty space among people where together we can practice true obedience.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

291. “Following Jesus means to let go of the “I” and move toward the “other.” Following Jesus means to dare to move out of ourselves and to slowly let go of building our “self” up.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

292. “Remember, you are held safe. You are loved. You are protected. You are in communion with God and with those whom God has sent you. What is of God will last. It belongs to the eternal life. Choose it, and it will be yours.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

293. “The real mystery of marriage is not that husband and wife love each other so much that they can recognize God in each other’s lives, but more because God loves them so much that they can discover each other more and more as living reminder’s of God’s presence.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

294. “Our lives are unique stones in the mosaic of human existence – priceless and irreplaceable.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

295. “I’ve had a tremendous problem with depression in my life. I’d rather not talk about it, because it’s over. But depression is real.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

296. “In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face, and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my own hands. Their flesh is my flesh, their blood is my blood, their pain is my pain, their smile is my smile.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

297. “The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

298. “The world says, “When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted, but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own destiny.” But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

299. “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. Our lives are filled with examples which tell us that leadership asks for understanding and that understanding requires sharing.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

300. “As long as we relate to the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the fields and the oceans as properties which we can manipulate according to our real or fabricated needs, nature remains opaque, and does not reveal to us its true being.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen