Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “Creation is a process that is still happening and we’re in on it! We are a part of this endless creativity of God.”

— Richard Rohr

205. “In the Sermon on the Mount it’s quite clear that these are the three great barriers we have to overcome to understand Jesus and the Reign of God. But in Christianity we have always been concerned with ecclesiological questions, sacramental questions, sacerdotal questions, and, needless to say, sexual questions – questions that Jesus practically never bothered with.”

— Richard Rohr

206. “When we can see the image of God where we don’t want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.”

— Richard Rohr

207. “Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.”

— Richard Rohr

208. “It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody.”

— Richard Rohr

209. “Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in – but only to be moved out from.”

— Richard Rohr

210. “Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

— Richard Rohr

211. “Famine, poverty, abuse, you can’t keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.”

— Richard Rohr

212. “Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.”

— Richard Rohr

213. “Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms. In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the “suffering” of God. The Christ learned this self-emptying, or kenosis, 183 from his eternal life in the Trinity. It is not just Jesus who suffers, but the cross is the visible symbol of what is always going on inside of God!”

— Richard Rohr

214. “Bonaventure’s theology is never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. He is all cosmic optimism and hope! Once it lost this kind of mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than being included in – and delighting in – an all-pervasive plan that is already in place.”

— Richard Rohr

215. “At best, the theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At worst, it led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love his own creation.”

— Richard Rohr

216. “It’s important to note that Jesus and Christ are two different faith affirmations. Hardly any Christians have been taught that – they think “Christ” is Jesus’s last name.”

— Richard Rohr

217. “The Holy Spirit is God desiring in you and through you – until it becomes your desiring too.”

— Richard Rohr

218. “Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.”

— Richard Rohr

219. “We have become human doings more than human beings, and the verb “rest,” as Jesus uses it, is largely foreign to us.”

— Richard Rohr

220. “Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have – right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.”

— Richard Rohr

221. “Christians affirm the communion of saints in the Nicene Creed, but I think there should be an equal belief in the “communion of sinners.”

— Richard Rohr

222. “By the age of seven, almost all of us have separated our body and our soul from our mind, and we give all of our credence to our mind, disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our souls, which abide and grow more in silence. Descartes.”

— Richard Rohr

223. “There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of “common sense,” of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful “Beatrice.”

— Richard Rohr

224. “The important thing is the willingness to give back the gift that is you, not the perfection of the gift itself. Can you feel the difference?”

— Richard Rohr

225. “Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.”

— Richard Rohr

226. “Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.” It is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also accountability and healing in the process.”

— Richard Rohr

227. “As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name.”

— Richard Rohr

228. “We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.”

— Richard Rohr

229. “It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.”

— Richard Rohr

230. “To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both “a lever and a place to stand” before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.”

— Richard Rohr

231. “It is only through the holes in our soul that we break out and God breaks through.”

— Richard Rohr

232. “You rest in God, not in outcomes.”

— Richard Rohr

233. “Human strength is defined in asserting boundaries. God, it seems, is in the business of dissolving boundaries. So we enter into paradox – what’s Three is one and what’s One is three. We just can’t resolve that, and so we confuse unity with uniformity.”

— Richard Rohr

234. “Remember this: pure literalism always leads to a decrease in meaning. Mythology and sacred texts try to lead us and allow us to have the experience for ourselves. Through our experience we discover that encounter is not only possible but desirable. So often we struggle with experiencing our experiences.”

— Richard Rohr

235. “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity but to change the mind of humanity about God. It is “simple and beautiful;” as Einstein said great truth would always have to be.”

— Richard Rohr

236. “Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without my pushing.”

— Richard Rohr

237. “Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.”

— Richard Rohr

238. “Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There’s no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That’s how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives. – from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps.”

— Richard Rohr

239. “To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all.”

— Richard Rohr

240. “If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.”

— Richard Rohr

241. “I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.”

— Richard Rohr

242. “God seems to have chosen to manifest the invisible in what we call the “visible,” so that all things visible are the revelation of God’s endlessly diffusive spiritual energy. Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again.”

— Richard Rohr

243. “As to his gospel, Jesus Christ came into the world as the image of the invisible God to communicate to us that not only did we not need to be afraid of God, but that God is more for us than we are ourselves or one another. God’s love is infinite, and unstoppable, and will win!”

— Richard Rohr

244. “God oft-times doesn’t give a lot of answers but just keeps telling us who we are. God just keeps inviting us into that place where love is alive and where God is in love.”

— Richard Rohr

245. “As Dorothy Day once wisely said, “What the Gospel forever takes away from Christians is the right to judge between the worthy and the unworthy poor.”

— Richard Rohr

246. “Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.”

— Richard Rohr

247. “The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.”

— Richard Rohr

248. “The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them.”

— Richard Rohr

249. “Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature.”

— Richard Rohr

250. “God resists our evil and conquers it with good, or how could God ask the same of us?! Think about that. God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change. Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure. Love is not love unless it is totally free. Grace is not grace unless it is totally free. You would think Christian people would know that by now, but it is still a secret of the soul.”

— Richard Rohr