Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “The trouble is that we have made the Bible into a bunch of ideas – about which we can be right or wrong – rather than an invitation to a new set of eyes. Even worse, many of those ideas are the same, old tired ones, mirroring the reward and punishment system of the dominant culture, so that most people don’t even expect anything good or anything new from the momentous revelation that we call the Bible. The.”

— Richard Rohr

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

318. “Without some deconstruction, everything becomes idolatrous. The prophets were religious deconstructionists.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

323. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

326. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

334. “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

335. “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

336. “The spiritual life is always about letting go of unnecessary baggage so that we’re prepared for death’s final letting go.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

338. “Don’t start with the One and try to make it into Three, but start with the Three and see that this is the deepest nature of the One. This starting point, along with the contemplative mind to understand it, was much more emphasized and developed in the Eastern church, which is frankly why it still sounds foreign to most of the Western churches.”

— Richard Rohr

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Richard Rohr

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “In fact, the best of modern theology is revealing a strong “turn toward participation,” as opposed to religion as mere observation, affirmation, moralism, or group belonging. There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant.”

— Richard Rohr