Top 500 Henri J.M. Nouwen Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

404. “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

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

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

406. “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

407. “Am I afraid to die? I am every time I let myself be seduced by the noisy voices of my world telling me that my “little life” is all I have and advising me to cling to it with all my might. But when I let these voices move to the background of my life and listen to that small soft voice calling me the Beloved, I know that there is nothing to fear and that dying is the greatest act of love, the act that leads me into the eternal embrace of my God whose love is everlasting.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

408. “They discover that there are people who heal each other’s wounds, forgive each other’s offenses, share their possessions, foster the spirit of community, celebrate the gifts they have received, and live in constant anticipation of the full manifestation of God’s glory.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

409. “Still, as long as you keep pointing to the specifics, you will miss the full meaning of your pain. You will deceive yourself into believing that if the people, circumstances, and events had been different, your pain would not exist. This might be partly true, but.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

410. “In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

411. “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

412. “Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

413. “Spiritual reading, therefore, is slow, deliberate, meditative reading in which we allow the words to penetrate our heart and question our spirit.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

414. “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

415. “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

416. “Thus, our brokenness can become a gateway to new life.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

417. “We must ask ourselves how many times others would benefit more from our silence than from our words.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

418. “The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

419. “I am constantly surprised at how I keep taking the gifts God has given me – my health, my intellectual and emotional gifts – and keep using them to impress people, receive affirmation and praise, and compete for rewards, instead of developing them for the glory of God.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

420. “The great movement of the spiritual life is from a deaf, nonhearing life to a life of listening.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

421. “Silence is the discipline that helps us to go beyond the entertainment quality of our lives.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

422. “Poverty, pain, struggle, anguish, agony, and even inner darkness may continue to be part of our experience. They may even be God’s way of purifying us. But life is no longer boring, resentful, depressing, or lonely because we have come to know that everything that happens is part of our way to the Father.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

423. “We often live as if our happiness depended on having. But I don’t know anyone who is really happy because of what he or she has. True joy, happiness, and inner peace come from the giving of ourselves to others. A happy life is a life for others. That truth, however, is usually discovered when we are confronted with our brokenness.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

424. “But in Solitude, we can pay attention to our inner self.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

425. “As long as religious people are well dressed, well fed, and well cared for, words about being in solidarity with the poor will remain pious words more likely to evoke good feelings than creative actions. As long as we are doing well what others are doing better and more efficiently, we can hardly expect to be considered the salt of the earth or the light of the world. In short, as long as we avoid displacement, we will miss the compassionate life to which our Lord calls us.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

426. “Many consumerist economies stay afloat by manipulating the low self-esteem of their consumers and by creating spiritual expectations through material means.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

427. “Solitude, community, and ministry are certainly not just for celibates! Celibates also have a hard time keeping up.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

428. “Jesus’ whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God’s love.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

429. “But human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process, because it forces us to face directly our own condition in all its beauty as well as misery.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

430. “It is very hard to stay in touch with our true identity because those who want our money, our time, and our energy profit more from our insecurity and fears than from our inner freedom.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

431. “When we are alone with God, the Spirit prays in us. The challenge is to develop a simple discipline or spiritual practice to embrace some empty time and empty space every day.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

432. “Jesus, the Son of God, is the man of sorrows, but also the man of complete joy.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

433. “It is quite understandable that you are afraid of this place. You have so little knowledge of it. You have caught glimpses of it, you have even been there at times, but for most of your life you have dwelt among your emotions, passions, and feelings and searched in them for inner peace and joy.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

434. “For me, God is the one who calls me the Beloved, and I have a desire to express to others how I try to become more fully who I already am.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

435. “Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it. You discard it because you are fixed on receiving it from the same person to whom you gave it.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

436. “We might be competent in many subjects, but we cannot become an expert in the things of God. God is greater than our minds and cannot be caught within the boundaries of our finite concepts. Thus, spiritual formation leads not to a proud understanding of divinity, but to docta ignorantia, an “articulate not-knowing.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

437. “Rembrandt portrays the father as the man who has transcended the ways of his children. His own loneliness and anger may have been there, but they have been transformed by suffering and tears. His loneliness has become endless solitude, his anger boundless gratitude. This is who I have to become. I see it as clearly as I see the immense beauty of the father’s emptiness and compassion. Can I let the younger and the elder son grow in me to the maturity of the compassionate father?”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

438. “Christ invites us to remain in touch with the many sufferings of every day and to taste the beginning of hope and new life right there, where we live amid our hurts and pains and brokenness.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

439. “Jesus does not speak about a change of activities, a change in contacts, or even a change of pace. He speaks about a change of heart.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

440. “You have to acknowledge where you are and affirm that place. You have to be willing to live your loneliness, your incompleteness, your lack of total incarnation fearlessly, and trust that God will give you the people to keep showing you the truth of who you are.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

441. “A good host is the one who believes that his guest is carrying a promise he wants to reveal to anyone who shows genuine interest.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

442. “Percayalah bahwa pada suatu saat cinta akan menaklukkan dirimu sehingga bagian dirimu yang paling menakutkan sekalipun akan membiarkan cinta mengusir semua ketakutanmu.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

443. “For a very long time I considered low self-esteem to be some kind of virtue. But now I realize that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

444. “It is as if we have been wandering in a foreign land looking for peace and purpose in our lives and a true sense of who we are. Jesus stands in our midst and beckons us home so that we can be restored to our true selves.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

445. “Our God is a God who cares, heals, guides, directs, challenges, confronts, corrects. To discern means first of all to listen to God, to pay attention to God’s active presence, and to obey God’s prompting, direction, leadings, and guidance.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

446. “Therefore every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and he who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

447. “To be a minister means above all to become powerless, or in more precise terms, to speak with our powerlessness to the condition of powerlessness which is so keenly felt but so seldom expressed by the people of our age.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

448. “Friendship and love cannot develop in the form of an anxious clinging to each other.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

449. “People who pray stand receptive before the world. They no longer grab but caress, they no longer bite but kiss, they no longer examine but admire.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

450. “A lot of people have to spend so much energy on overcoming their low opinion of themselves that they seldom get round to asking about the purpose of their existence. And if they do, it is often out of fear.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen