Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day.”

— Richard Rohr

302. “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

303. “If you look at the history of heretics who are condemned, their transgression is normally about issues of authority, priesthood, administration of sacraments, and “Who’s got the power?” I cannot think of anyone who was ever burned at the stake for not taking care of the widows and orphans, or for any issues of orthopraxy.”

— Richard Rohr

304. “We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.”

— Richard Rohr

305. “Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.”

— Richard Rohr

306. “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our Life’s Star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness. And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy.2.”

— Richard Rohr

307. “In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.”

— Richard Rohr

308. “In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.”

— Richard Rohr

309. “We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.”

— Richard Rohr

310. “Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys as a penance” still perpetuated a de facto notion of a juridical exchange instead of any deep experience of healing forgiveness or unearned grace. You cannot deal with spiritual things in a courtroom manner. It does not achieve its purpose; it does not work at a deep level. We forgot our own unique job description as people of the Gospel and imitated courts of law instead.”

— Richard Rohr

311. “We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right.”

— Richard Rohr

312. “In many ways what we’re seeing as we explore the Bible is an observing of the development of human consciousness and human readiness for God. That’s why we do see some difference between the earlier and later Scriptures: There’s been a development in consciousness. In.”

— Richard Rohr

313. “When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.”

— Richard Rohr

314. “Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.”

— Richard Rohr

315. “Ancients knew that you need guidance, patronage and protection as you move from one place or state to another, whenever you cross a bridge. You had better know what you are doing when you leave one group or place to join another.”

— Richard Rohr

316. “Perhaps the primary example of our lack of attention to the Christ Mystery can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect physicality more than most religion does!”

— Richard Rohr

317. “One has to wonder, do we really want people to grow, or do we just want to be in control of the moment?”

— Richard Rohr

318. “Sacrificial religion was all exposed in Jesus’ response to any mechanical or mercenary notion of religion, but we soon went right back to it in many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms, because the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control.”

— Richard Rohr

319. “We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.”

— Richard Rohr

320. “When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.”

— Richard Rohr

321. “The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.”

— Richard Rohr

322. “If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we’re in our middle years, when we’ve experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines.”

— Richard Rohr

323. “I have often wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on a courthouse lawn. Then I realize that the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus would probably not be very good for any war, any macho worldview, the wealthy, or our consumer economy.”

— Richard Rohr

324. “Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.”

— Richard Rohr

325. “You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.”

— Richard Rohr

326. “In a culture like ours, still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or by the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs, like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts, are quickly cut, if even considered. The message is clear that we are largely an adolescent culture.”

— Richard Rohr

327. “It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our garbage is buried in the unconscious. So it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes.”

— Richard Rohr

328. “Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”

— Richard Rohr

329. “For some of you, my quoting Jesus is the only way you will trust me; for others, it gives you more reasons to mistrust me, but I have to take both risks. If I dared to present all of these ideas simply as my ideas, or because they match modern psychology or old mythology, I would be dishonest. Jesus for me always clinches the deal, and I sometimes wonder why I did not listen to him in the first place.”

— Richard Rohr

330. “Once we begin to learn the contemplative mind, we realize it is almost the natural way of seeing – and we have unlearned it! It is quite natural, as we see in children before the age of six or seven when they start judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.”

— Richard Rohr

331. “Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.”

— Richard Rohr

332. “Try to say that: “I don’t know anything”. We used to call it “tabula rasa” in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don’t need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner’s mind. We need to say with the blind man, “I want to see”.”

— Richard Rohr

333. “It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again – but now on a new level.”

— Richard Rohr

334. “We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.”

— Richard Rohr

335. “There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.”

— Richard Rohr

336. “Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, “What would be good for the next seven generations?” Compare that to the present “Tea Party” movement in America.”

— Richard Rohr

337. “Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point.”

— Richard Rohr

338. “Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the “practical atheism” that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.”

— Richard Rohr

339. “Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have – right now.”

— Richard Rohr

340. “Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.”

— Richard Rohr

341. “It seems that human beings cannot see what they are not readied to see. We cannot hear what we have not been prepared to hear. The “obvious” seems to have little correlation with our acceptance of it. We all have an amazing capacity for missing the point.”

— Richard Rohr

342. “We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for private and pious devotions that usually have little power to actually change us or call our ego assumptions into question.”

— Richard Rohr

343. “I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort – every day – is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received.”

— Richard Rohr

344. “It is the things that you cannot do anything about and the things that you cannot do anything with that do something with you.”

— Richard Rohr

345. “When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting... you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.”

— Richard Rohr

346. “All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring.”

— Richard Rohr

347. “They’ve gotten so used to these gatherings not being meaningful that they no longer know how to allow them to touch their heart or change their mind. The Holy Spirit is again the Missing Person of the Blessed Trinity.”

— Richard Rohr

348. “The same powerful Scripture text that brings a loving person to even greater love will be mangled and misused by a fearful or egocentric person. This is surely what Jesus means when he talks about the one who has being given more and those who have not losing what little they have.”

— Richard Rohr

349. “I decided years ago that if I’m going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.”

— Richard Rohr

350. “What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important.”

— Richard Rohr