Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.”

— Richard Rohr

252. “Genuine humility is based on a realistic self-appraisal and a healthy feeling of self-worth.”

— Richard Rohr

253. “You do need some successes as a young person. They don’t inflate the ego necessarily, they just give you identity and ego structure. But, don’t construct your life around creating those. Or you will become narcissistic and ego-centric. That won’t get you anywhere.”

— Richard Rohr

254. “One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action.”

— Richard Rohr

255. “I believe that there are two necessary paths enabling us to move toward wisdom: a radical journey inward and a radical journey outward. For.”

— Richard Rohr

256. “The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.”

— Richard Rohr

257. “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.”

— Richard Rohr

258. “As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind – just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector – of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and “mutual deference”267 – “so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself,” as Augustine daringly put it.268.”

— Richard Rohr

259. “Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.”

— Richard Rohr

260. “God does not decide to love, therefore, and God’s love can never be determined by the worthiness or unworthiness of the object. But God is Love itself.4 God cannot not love, because love is the nature of God’s very being.”

— Richard Rohr

261. “God can most easily be lost by being thought found.”

— Richard Rohr

262. “One is struck in the study of saints, angels and gods by a pattern that seems quaint and harmless. Yet, it is so common that I know there must be a deeper meaning. There always seem to be guardians and spirits of doors, bridges, exits and entranceways.”

— Richard Rohr

263. “Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.”

— Richard Rohr

264. “Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God, and is thus at the heart of religion. The Center is everywhere.”

— Richard Rohr

265. “As physicist Albert Einstein frequently said in a different way: No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused the problem in the first place.”

— Richard Rohr

266. “If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.”

— Richard Rohr

267. “It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.”

— Richard Rohr

268. “Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

270. “Love grounds us by creating focus, direction, motivation, even joy – and if we don’t find these things in love, we usually will try to find them in hate.”

— Richard Rohr

271. “In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan and find it insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.”

— Richard Rohr

272. “Think of the cold Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, or the monk who tries to eliminate all humor in The Name of the Rose, or the frowning Koran burners of Florida. Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.”

— Richard Rohr

273. “We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.”

— Richard Rohr

274. “The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God.”

— Richard Rohr

275. “The journey never happens alone.”

— Richard Rohr

276. “One time, a Protestant minister said, “We made Jesus blonde haired and blue eyed and very cute. We made Jesus somehow a much more feminine figure.” And there’s probably truth to that.”

— Richard Rohr

277. “All people must learn to draw from their own Implanted Spirit, which is the only thing that will help them in the long run anyway. Jesus gives them the courage to trust their own “inner Christ” – and not just its outer manifestation in himself.”

— Richard Rohr

278. “Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff.”

— Richard Rohr

279. “You have to find some way to not become a cynical or negative person, a person who keeps walking around and opening your eyes in the outside world but inside you close down, a person who stops expecting tomorrow to be better than today.”

— Richard Rohr

280. “We have moved to a level where we have made happiness and contentment largely impossible. We have created a pseudo-happiness, largely based in having instead of being. We are so overstimulated that the ordinary no longer delights us. We cannot rest or abide in our naked being in God, as Jesus offers us.”

— Richard Rohr

281. “The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.”

— Richard Rohr

282. “A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.”

— Richard Rohr

283. “Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.”

— Richard Rohr

284. “The opposite of contemplation is not action, it is reaction.”

— Richard Rohr

285. “To believe in Jesus, is to believe that the historic person who lived on this earth more than 2000 years ago was the image of the invisible God. That’s a huge leap of faith, but it is my leap of faith, it’s the act of faith of the Christian community.”

— Richard Rohr

286. “Setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk in the deepest sense of the term, and yet an adventure too. The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently. The new is always by definition unfamiliar and untested, so God, life, destiny, suffering have to give us a push – usually a big one – or we will not go.”

— Richard Rohr

287. “We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, in an undefended moment, “My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.”

— Richard Rohr

288. “Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed. So watch for any overreactions or overdenials.”

— Richard Rohr

289. “Shadowy material resides inside each one of us, but the man who is willing to face his own capacity for darkness will discover his deepest inner goodness and the presence of the divine within him. Some men never discover the divine presence within because they can’t bring themselves to face their demons. Don’t try to engineer this process or manufacture any angels. It will be done to you; just do not hate or fear the falling.”

— Richard Rohr

290. “Given our present evolution of consciousness, and especially the historical and technological access we now have to the “whole picture,” I now wonder if a sincere person can even have a healthy and holy “personal” relationship with God if that God does not also connect them to the universal. A personal God cannot mean a smaller God, nor can God make you in any way smaller – or such would not be God.”

— Richard Rohr

291. “Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.”

— Richard Rohr

292. “But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a “thisness” way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.”

— Richard Rohr

293. “We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the “problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.”

— Richard Rohr

294. “Because I am a part of the Big Picture, I do matter and substantially so. Because I am only a part, however, I am rightly situated off to stage right – and happily so. What freedom there is in such truth! We are inherently important and included, yet not burdened with manufacturing or sustaining that private importance. Our dignity is given by God, and we are freed from ourselves!”

— Richard Rohr

295. “Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When we don’t know love, when we don’t experience love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the small self, we become restless.”

— Richard Rohr

296. “Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You’ll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism “thinking.”

— Richard Rohr

297. “When ‘happiness’ eludes us – as, eventually, it always will – we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again.”

— Richard Rohr

298. “If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day.”

— Richard Rohr

299. “When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.”

— Richard Rohr

300. “Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. – Walt Whitman.”

— Richard Rohr