Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Love is always stronger than death, and unto that love you have now returned.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

103. “It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!”

— Richard Rohr

104. “Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution.”

— Richard Rohr

105. “Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it’s difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.”

— Richard Rohr

106. “The Crucified and Risen Christ uses the mistakes of the past to create a positive future, a future of redemption instead of retribution. He does not eliminate or punish the mistakes. He uses them for transformative purposes. People formed by such love are indestructible. Forgiveness might just be the very best description of what God’s goodness engenders in humanity.”

— Richard Rohr

107. “The Gospel gives our suffering personal and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others, and finally, by connecting us to the very pain of God.”

— Richard Rohr

108. “The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it “Always Advent,” but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.”

— Richard Rohr

109. “Most women prefer circles of sharing to pyramids and hierarchies. They prefer conversation to construction. They will usually choose nurturance and empathy over competition and climbing. They will normally choose connection over simple performance games.”

— Richard Rohr

110. “Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.”

— Richard Rohr

111. “Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens.”

— Richard Rohr

112. “Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is about surrendering and letting go rather than achieving and possessing. It’s more about entering the mystery than arriving at a mental certitude.”

— Richard Rohr

113. “If we don’t learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.”

— Richard Rohr

114. “Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for the very One who created you.”

— Richard Rohr

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “The ego knows itself by comparison.”

— Richard Rohr

119. “I think most human beings are dualistic thinkers. It gets them through the day. It gives them a sense of superiority and security – that’s what the ego wants.”

— Richard Rohr

120. “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

121. “If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.”

— Richard Rohr

122. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

130. “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

131. “Mature prayer always breaks into gratitude.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

135. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

137. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

146. “Each generation has to appropriate its deepest beliefs for itself. We used to say it this way: “God has no grandchildren.” Each generation must itself be realigned with God and discover the mystery for itself.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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