Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Our starting place was always original goodness,10 not original sin. This makes our ending place – and everything in between – possessing an inherent capacity for goodness, truth, and beauty.”

— Richard Rohr

102. “Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.”

— Richard Rohr

103. “A person who can laugh and go with life does not demand to be in control, which is why the most controlling people may be sarcastic but lack an authentic sense of humor.”

— Richard Rohr

104. “The ego knows itself by comparison.”

— Richard Rohr

105. “People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.”

— Richard Rohr

106. “Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”

— Richard Rohr

107. “The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection – and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth.”

— Richard Rohr

108. “It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your “I” is great and one with God, you can ironically be quite content with a small and ordinary “I.” No grandstanding is necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever.”

— Richard Rohr

109. “As I’m coming to realize more and more, God holds everything together in a mysterious quantum entanglement. With each breath we participate in the life-death-life pattern that always ends in resurrection. My hope is that each of us will choose to participate consciously, aware of this privilege and delight in being co-creators with God. Just pray that I can do whatever God wants me to do.”

— Richard Rohr

110. “The saint is precisely one who has no “I” to protect or project. His or her “I” is in conscious union with the “I AM” of God, and that is more than enough. Divine.”

— Richard Rohr

111. “Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God.”

— Richard Rohr

112. “The healthy do not need a doctor, but sick people do. I have not come to coddle the comfortable, but to set trapped people free for a new life.” Luke 5:31–32.”

— Richard Rohr

113. “It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.”

— Richard Rohr

114. “Moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism.”

— Richard Rohr

115. “There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.”

— Richard Rohr

116. “Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating.”

— Richard Rohr

117. “Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you.”

— Richard Rohr

118. “Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.”

— Richard Rohr

119. “I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don’t think so.”

— Richard Rohr

120. “The spiritual world is hidden and perfectly revealed in the physical world.”

— Richard Rohr

121. “The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.”

— Richard Rohr

122. “Mature prayer always breaks into gratitude.”

— Richard Rohr

123. “A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see.”

— Richard Rohr

124. “Each one of us has to find such a relationship in the suffering that we ourselves experience, be it the loss of a job or a home, the death of someone we love, rejection by our parents or our children, the breakdown of a marriage, institutional injustice, social violence or whatever. The causes of our personal suffering are many. And when we find the living, liberating answer that gives us meaning in the midst of suffering, we realize that it is a very personal answer.”

— Richard Rohr

125. “Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.”

— Richard Rohr

126. “We always become what we behold; the presence that we practice matters.”

— Richard Rohr

127. “If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!”

— Richard Rohr

128. “Our starting place was always original goodness,10 not original sin. This.”

— Richard Rohr

129. “Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you’ll ever meet the real is now-here.”

— Richard Rohr

130. “Did you ever notice that Jesus himself was not really that upset at the bad behavior that most of us call sin? Instead, he directed his critical attention toward people who did not think they were sinners, who could not see their own shadows or dark sides, or acknowledge their complicity in the world’s domination systems.”

— Richard Rohr

131. “Contemplation is the “second gaze,” through which you see something in its particularity and yet also in a much larger frame.”

— Richard Rohr

132. “If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If.”

— Richard Rohr

133. “You never become humble except through fully accepting humiliations – usually many times.”

— Richard Rohr

134. “If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God!”

— Richard Rohr

135. “In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward – and by ourselves. It works for so few, and it cannot serve us well in the long run – because it is not true. It is an inherently win-lose game, and more and more people find themselves on the losing side.”

— Richard Rohr

136. “The more one gives one’s self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one’s self.”

— Richard Rohr

137. “Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.”

— Richard Rohr

138. “Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.”

— Richard Rohr

139. “Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.”

— Richard Rohr

140. “The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves – by themselves – and in themselves.”

— Richard Rohr

141. “A paradox is a seeming contradiction, always demanding a change on the side of the observer. If we look at almost all things honestly we see everything has a character of paradox to it. Everything, including ourselves.”

— Richard Rohr

142. “Jesus never said, “Worship me,” but he often said, “Follow me.” We have wasted a lot of good energy on “vicarious substitutionary atonement theories” and created a punitive and petty God in the process – a “Father God” who was incapable of forgiving “without blood.”6 Is God that unfree? Remember, the ego likes contests of win and lose and cannot even comprehend anything like win-win. Jesus became our substitute in losing, hoping it would let us off the hook, I guess.”

— Richard Rohr

143. “The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: “Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.”

— Richard Rohr

144. “Love is always stronger than death, and unto that love you have now returned.”

— Richard Rohr

145. “The Eucharist becomes a microcosmic moment of belief and power in which we say we believe in the real presence of God in Jesus, in this bread, and in this wine.”

— Richard Rohr

146. “Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.”

— Richard Rohr

147. “In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.”

— Richard Rohr

148. “In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of “winning” now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God.”

— Richard Rohr

149. “Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God – but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you – whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.”

— Richard Rohr

150. “Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.”

— Richard Rohr