Top 500 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

352. “To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

353. “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

354. “As long as we have our stories there is hope.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

355. “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

356. “Spiritual greatness has nothing to do with being greater than others. It has everything to do with being as great as each of us can be. True sanctity is precisely drinking our own cup and trusting that by thus fully claiming our own, irreplaceable journey, we can become a source of hope for many.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

357. “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

358. “Although I am a committed Catholic priest, and nowhere hide that fact, my focus is very much a spiritual journey.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

363. “What is forgotten cannot be healed, and that which cannot be healed easily becomes the cause of greater evil.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

364. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “God looks at his people as children of a family who are happy that those who have done only a little bit are as much loved as those who accomplish much.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen