Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “So get ready for a great adventure, the one you were really born for. If we never get to our little bit of heaven, our life does not make much sense, and we have created our own “hell.” So get ready for some new freedom, some dangerous permission, some hope from nowhere, some unexpected happiness, some stumbling stones, some radical grace, and some new and pressing responsibility for yourself and for our suffering world.”

— Richard Rohr

152. “Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.”

— Richard Rohr

153. “Grace is just the natural loving flow of things when we allow it, instead of resisting it. Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit.”

— Richard Rohr

154. “Remember, mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand – it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, “I’ve got it.” Always and forever, mystery gets you!”

— Richard Rohr

155. “To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won’t be afraid of death because you’re experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world.”

— Richard Rohr

156. “Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this.”

— Richard Rohr

157. “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

158. “In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us.”

— Richard Rohr

159. “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

160. “One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate.”

— Richard Rohr

161. “All Mature Spirituality Is About Letting Go.”

— Richard Rohr

162. “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

163. “Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.”

— Richard Rohr

164. “I believe contemplation shows us that nothing inside us is as bad as our hatred and denial of the bad. Hating and denying it only complicates our problems. All of life is grist for the mill. Paula D’Arcy puts it, “God comes to us disguised as our life.” Everything belongs; God uses everything. There are no dead-ends. There is no wasted energy. Everything.”

— Richard Rohr

165. “Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.”

— Richard Rohr

166. “The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.”

— Richard Rohr

167. “Jesus praised faith and trust – even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.”

— Richard Rohr

168. “My scientist friends have come up with things like ‘principles of uncertainty’ and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of ‘faith’! How strange that the very word ‘faith’ has come to mean its exact opposite.”

— Richard Rohr

169. “We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.”

— Richard Rohr

170. “Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.”

— Richard Rohr

171. “Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with. Think about that.”

— Richard Rohr

172. “Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.”

— Richard Rohr

173. “As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our actual “sacred dance.”

— Richard Rohr

174. “The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.”

— Richard Rohr

175. “A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.”

— Richard Rohr

176. “All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given – which is ourselves!”

— Richard Rohr

177. “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

178. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.”

— Richard Rohr

179. “As my father, St. Francis, put it, when the heart is pure, “Love responds to Love alone” and has little to do with duty, obligation, requirement, or heroic anything. It is easy to surrender when you know that nothing but Love and Mercy is on the other side.”

— Richard Rohr

180. “As you look back on a year almost ended, recall the ways in which God has been inviting you to return, again and again, to Love which is the same as returning to God.”

— Richard Rohr

181. “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

182. “Faith is so rare-and religion so common-because no one wants to live between first base and second base. Faith is the in-between space where you’re not sure you’ll make it to second base. You’ve let go of one thing and haven’t yet latched into another. Most of us choose the security of first base.”

— Richard Rohr

183. “The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.”

— Richard Rohr

184. “St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.”

— Richard Rohr

185. “It is almost impossible to fall in love with majesty, power, or perfection. These make us fearful and codependent, but seldom truly loving. On some level, love can only happen between equals, and vulnerability levels the playing field. What Christians believe is that God somehow became our equal when he became the human “Jesus,” a name that is, without doubt, the vulnerable name for God.”

— Richard Rohr

186. “We each have our inner program for happiness, our plans by which we can be secure, esteemed, and in control, and are blissfully unaware that these cannot work for us for the long haul – without our becoming more and more control freaks ourselves. Something has to break our primary addiction, which is to our own power and our false programs for happiness.”

— Richard Rohr

187. “This new world order is based on the experience of a God who is experienced personally. Jesus seems to be saying that God is not a philosophical system, a theory to be proven or an energy to be discussed or controlled, although we have often reduced God to such. Jesus believes that God is a Person to be imitated, enjoyed and loved.”

— Richard Rohr

188. “And we must – absolutely must – maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.”

— Richard Rohr

189. “Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.”

— Richard Rohr

190. “Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.”

— Richard Rohr

191. “Faith is not a means to something further. It is not something we do in order to get to heaven. Faith is its own end. To have faith is already to have come alive.”

— Richard Rohr

192. “Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. What an enigma!”

— Richard Rohr

193. “If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.”

— Richard Rohr

194. “We’ve turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.”

— Richard Rohr

195. “Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message. As a result, we spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying to get other people to do the same. Too often this obsession became a pious substitute for actually following what he taught – and he did ask us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him.”

— Richard Rohr

196. “If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews.”

— Richard Rohr

197. “The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.”

— Richard Rohr

198. “If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans.”

— Richard Rohr

199. “In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined – by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence.”

— Richard Rohr

200. “We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone. Alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.”

— Richard Rohr