Top 500 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The first task of seeking guidance then is to touch your own struggles, doubts, and insecurities – in short, to affirm your life as a quest.8 Your life, my life, is given graciously by God. Our lives are not problems to be solved but journeys to be taken with Jesus as our friend and finest guide.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

352. “God is the hub of the wheel of life. The closer we come to God the closer we come to each other. The basis of community is not primarily our ideas, feelings, and emotions about each other but our common search for God. When we keep our minds and hearts directed toward God, we will come more fully “together.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

353. “We have to keep asking ourselves: ‘What does it all mean? What is God trying to tell us? How are we called to live in the midst of all this?’ Without such questions our lives become numb and flat.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

354. “Thus the authority of compassion is the possibility of man to forgive his brother, because forgiveness is only real for him who has discovered the.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

355. “Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

356. “When love chooses, it chooses with a perfect sensitivity for the unique beauty of the chosen one, and it chooses without making anyone else feel excluded.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

357. “Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people’s response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule. You have to close yourself to the outside world so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain. God will send to you the people with whom you can share your anguish, who can lead you closer to the true source of love.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

358. “People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

359. “To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer. It is more than a word of praise or appreciation; it is more than pointing out someone’s talents or good deeds; it is more than putting someone in the light. To give a blessing is to affirm, to say ‘yes’ to a person’s Belovedness.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

360. “The world is evil only when you become its slave. The world has a lot to offer – just as Egypt did for the children of Jacob – as long as you don’t feel bound to obey it. The great struggle facing you is not to leave the world, to reject your ambitions and aspirations, or to despise money, prestige, or success, but to claim your spiritual truth and to live in the world as someone who doesn’t belong to it.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

361. “Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

362. “I really believe that what we finally want is to know God, as God has come to be known through Jesus. Knowledge is knowledge of the heart – the Spirit – I would say. It is the Spirit in us who reveals God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

363. “The loud, boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

364. “The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

365. “Active waiting is essential to the spiritual life.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

366. “A friend is more than a therapist or confessor, even though a friend can sometimes heal us and offer us God’s forgiveness. A friend is that other person with whom we can share our solitude, our silence, and our prayer. A friend is that other person with whom we can look at a tree and say, “Isn’t that beautiful,” or sit on the beach and silently watch the sun disappear under the horizon. With a friend we don’t have to say or do something special. With a friend we can be still and know that God is there with both of us.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

367. “When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and the worlds of others, but when we are driven by loneliness, we tend to select just those remarks and events that bring immediate satisfaction to our own craving needs. Our.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

368. “When we have sold our identity to the judges of this world, we are bound to become restless, because of a growing need for affirmation and praise.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

369. “Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently from the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

370. “Not being welcome is your greatest fear. It connects with your birth fear, your fear of not being welcome in this life, and your death fear, your fear of not being welcome in the life after this. It is the deep-seated fear that it would have been better if you had not lived.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

371. “Ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

372. “Life is a gift to be grateful for and not a property to cling to.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

373. “Television is obviously an enormous intruder. Quite often people say they have no time, but in fact they waste a lot of time on things that are not healthy.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

374. “Today worrying means to be occupied and preoccupied with many things, while at the same time being bored, resentful, depressed, and very lonely.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

375. “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 own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love. The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God’s Word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

376. “Solitude is an essential element for the spiritual health of a child. If we only stimulate our children – keep them busy with endless stories with no space to be alone – that’s not good.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

377. “When we have nothing to cling to as our own and cease thinking of ourselves as people who must defend privileges, we can open ourselves freely to others with the faithful expectation that our strength will manifest itself in our shared weakness.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

378. “Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

379. “Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life’s hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

380. “Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

381. “The evangelical movement has become just a bit victimized by a success-oriented culture, wanting the church – like the corporation – to be successful.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

382. “Radical servanthood challenges us, while attempting persistently to overcome poverty, hunger, illness, and any other form of human misery, to reveal the gentle presence of our compassionate God in the midst of our broken world.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

383. “I am very grateful that I am in touch with so many different church groups. I am always very moved by the fact that so many people – practically over the spectrum of the Christian world – are responding to my writing.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

384. “Isn’t it important for your friends close by and far away to know the high cost of these insights? Wouldn’t they find it a source of consolation to see that light and darkness, hope and despair, love and fear are never very far from each other, and that spiritual freedom often requires a fierce spiritual battle?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

385. “When I could no longer cling to my normal supports I discovered that true support and real safety lie far beyond the structures of our world.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

386. “The people who most affected me were the ones who got right in there with me, who cried with me, but who also had a certain authority, who dared to say what needed saying.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

387. “The Father’s love does not force itself on the beloved.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

388. “The more we become sensitive to our own journey the more we realize that we are leaving and coming back every day, every hour. Our minds wander away but eventually return; our hearts leave in search of affection and return sometimes broken; our bodies get carried away in their desires then sooner or later return. It’s never one dramatic life moment but a constant series of departures and returns.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

389. “When God looks at our world, God must weep. God must weep because the lust for power has entrapped and corrupted the human spirit. In the news and even in our families and ourselves we see that instead of gratitude there is resentment, instead of forgiveness there is revenge, instead of healing there is wounding, instead of compassion there is competition, instead of cooperation there is violence, and instead of love there is immense fear.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

390. “Precisely where I feel my poverty is where I discover God’s blessing.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

391. “Each individual human being can claim the Spirit of Jesus as the guiding spirit of his or her life. In that Spirit we can speak and act freely and confidently with the knowledge that the same Spirit that inspired Jesus is inspiring us.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

392. “If I have learned anything this week, it is that there is a contemplative way of working that is more important for me than praying, reading, or singing. Most people think that you go to the monastery to pray. Well, I prayed more this week than before but also discovered that I have not learned yet to make the work of my hands into a prayer.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

393. “In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

394. “Jesus goes up onto the mountain, gathers his disciples around him, and says: “How blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for uprightness, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness.” These words present a portrait of the child of God. It is a self-portrait of Jesus, the Beloved Son.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

395. “When we see ourselves in a relationship of love with God, there is always something of a lover’s dilemma, a struggle to give and receive, to trust and obey the call.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

396. “What I do know with unwavering certainty is the heart of the father. It is a heart of limitless mercy.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

397. “The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

398. “Reading with children is an enormous gift to them. It’s a great honor to invite children to read with adults.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

399. “The joy at the dramatic return of the younger son in no way means that the elder son was less loved, less appreciated, less favored. The father does not compare the two sons. He loves them both with a complete love and expresses that love according to their individual journeys.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

400. “The paradox of prayer is that it asks for a serious effort while it can only be received as a gift. We cannot plan, organize or manipulate God; but without a careful discipline, we cannot receive him either.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen