Top 90 Jean Vanier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In any case, community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bonded to each other, each of whom is a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate.”

— Jean Vanier

2. “To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance.”

— Jean Vanier

3. “Community is not an ideal; it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we want them to be.”

— Jean Vanier

4. “When we begin to believe that there is greater joy in working with and for others, rather than just for ourselves, then our society will truly become a place of celebration.”

— Jean Vanier

5. “Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.”

— Jean Vanier

6. “One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn’t as individuals.”

— Jean Vanier

7. “A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift.”

— Jean Vanier

8. “Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work – hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss – loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.”

— Jean Vanier

9. “Envy comes from people’s ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.”

— Jean Vanier

10. “Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don’t need a lot of money to be happy – in fact, the opposite.”

— Jean Vanier

11. “The strong need the weak as much as the weak need the strong.”

— Jean Vanier

12. “A community which refuses to welcome – whether through fear, weariness, insecurity, a desire to cling to comfort, or just because it is fed up with visitors – is dying spiritually.”

— Jean Vanier

13. “Love doesn’t mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.”

— Jean Vanier

14. “Love is an act of endless forgiveness.”

— Jean Vanier

15. “I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.”

— Jean Vanier

16. “Every human being is a mixture of light and darkness, trust and fear, love and hate.”

— Jean Vanier

17. “In the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts.”

— Jean Vanier

18. “Each person is sacred, no matter what his or her culture, religion, handicap, or fragility. Each person is created in God’s image; each one has a heart, a capacity to love and to be loved.”

— Jean Vanier

19. “To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.”

— Jean Vanier

20. “When we judge, we are pushing people away; we are creating a wall, a barrier. When we forgive we are destroying barriers, we come closer to others.”

— Jean Vanier

21. “Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don’t talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.”

— Jean Vanier

22. “Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: “He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community.” A community is not an abstract ideal.”

— Jean Vanier

23. “Jesus is the starving, the parched, the prisoner, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the dying. Jesus is the oppressed, the poor. To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus.”

— Jean Vanier

24. “Every child, every person needs to know that they are a source of joy; every child, every person, needs to be celebrated. Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity can our negative, broken self-images be transformed.”

— Jean Vanier

25. “Wisdom is something that comes, little by little, through a lot of listening.”

— Jean Vanier

26. “The belly laugh is the best way to evacuate anguish.”

— Jean Vanier

27. “Prayer is like a secret garden made up of silence and rest and inwardness. But there are a thousand and one doors into this garden and we all have to find our own.”

— Jean Vanier

28. “A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!”

— Jean Vanier

29. “When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.”

— Jean Vanier

30. “When children are loved, they live off trust; their bides and hearts open up to those who respect and love them, who understand and listen to them.”

— Jean Vanier

31. “Love is to recognize that the other person is a person, is precious, is important and has value.”

— Jean Vanier

32. “So many in our world today are suffering from isolation, war and oppression. So much money is spent on the construction of armaments. Many, many young people are in despair because of the danger...”

— Jean Vanier

33. “We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.”

— Jean Vanier

34. “It is only when we stand up, with all our failings and sufferings, and try to support others rather than withdraw into ourselves, that we can fully live the life of community.”

— Jean Vanier

35. “The cry for love and communion and for recognition that rises from the hearts of people in need reveals the fountain of love in us and our capacity to give life.”

— Jean Vanier

36. “To invite others to live with us is a sign that we aren’t afraid, that we have a treasure of truth and of peace to share.”

— Jean Vanier

37. “People are longing to rediscover true community. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.”

— Jean Vanier

38. “I have discovered the value of psychology and psychiatry, that their teachings can undo knots in us and permit life to flow again and aid us in becoming more truly human.”

— Jean Vanier

39. “A Christian community should do as Jesus did: propose and not impose. Its attraction must lie in the radiance cast by the love of brothers.”

— Jean Vanier

40. “Look at your own poverty welcome it cherish it don’t be afraid share your death because thus you will share your love and your life.”

— Jean Vanier

41. “There is nothing stronger than a heart which loves and is freely given.”

— Jean Vanier

42. “People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.”

— Jean Vanier

43. “People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.”

— Jean Vanier

44. “Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper.”

— Jean Vanier

45. “We don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness?”

— Jean Vanier

46. “To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus.”

— Jean Vanier

47. “Communion is mutual trust, mutual belonging; it is the to-and-fro movement of love between two people where each one gives and each one receives. Communion is not a fixed state, it is an...”

— Jean Vanier

48. “We all know well that we can do things for others and in the process crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of doing things by themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.”

— Jean Vanier

49. “Life is a succession of crises and moments when we have to rediscover who we are and what we really want.”

— Jean Vanier

50. “Power always has a direction. It is always downward, towards the weak but power is often confused with what is right.”

— Jean Vanier