Top 400 Richard Rohr Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.”

— Richard Rohr

352. “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

353. “Without meaning we are surely less than human and deeply discontented. Most meaning is largely preconceptual and not subject to words, and in that sense it is nonrational, but meaning lies in wait to appear and grab onto the right symbol in the right moment.”

— Richard Rohr

354. “It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.”

— Richard Rohr

355. “Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.”

— Richard Rohr

356. “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

357. “God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.”

— Richard Rohr

358. “You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.”

— Richard Rohr

359. “God brings us – through failure – from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.”

— Richard Rohr

360. “Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.”

— Richard Rohr

361. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that “us-and-them” seeing, and the dualistic thinking that results, is the foundation of almost all discontent and violence in the world.”

— Richard Rohr

362. “It’s not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.”

— Richard Rohr

363. “Deep communion and dear compassion is formed much more by shared pain than by shared pleasure.”

— Richard Rohr

364. “We ended up spreading our national cultures under the rubric of Jesus, instead of a universally liberating message under the name of Christ.”

— Richard Rohr

365. “Having a school really is the fulfillment of a longtime dream of mine.”

— Richard Rohr

366. “Before Jesus, it was all about earning and meriting and performing, and Paul knew that would eat us all alive – as it has.”

— Richard Rohr

367. “To know the Lord and his ways,” as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.”

— Richard Rohr

368. “Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for “false evidence appearing real.”

— Richard Rohr

369. “People who have been initiated “broke through in what felt like breaking down”.”

— Richard Rohr

370. “Even inside an incarnational worldview, we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or “resurrection.” This is the “pattern that connects” and solidifies our relationship with everything around us.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

372. “In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete “decision to turn our lives over to the care of God,” even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings.”

— Richard Rohr

373. “So Jesus pulls no punches, saying you must “hate” your home base in some way and make choices beyond it.”

— Richard Rohr

374. “For the man on the quest, the universe becomes enchanting-an effect that good religion accomplishes. There are no dead ends, no wasted time, no useless characters or meaningless happenings. All has meaning, and God is in all things waiting to speak and to bless. Everything belongs once a man is on his real quest and asking the right questions.”

— Richard Rohr

375. “Religion was made to order to “save the world,” to use a phrase Christians use so much, but we really haven’t been doing a good job of it for centuries. It’s heartbreaking really.”

— Richard Rohr

376. “Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him – or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves – us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.”

— Richard Rohr

377. “Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.”

— Richard Rohr

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

— Richard Rohr

379. “All creation is groaning in one great act of giving birth. – ROMANS 8:22 I still have many things to say to you, but they would be too much for you now. – JOHN 16:12.”

— Richard Rohr

380. “I would ask you to consider the crucifix as a homeopathic image, like those medicines that give you just enough of the disease so you could develop a resistance and be healed from it. The cross dramatically reveals the problem of ignorant killing, to inoculate us against doing the same thing.”

— Richard Rohr

381. “It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.”

— Richard Rohr

382. “My starting point is that we’re already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is.”

— Richard Rohr

383. “We mend and renew the world by strengthening inside ourselves what we seek outside ourselves, and not by demanding it of others or trying to force it on others.”

— Richard Rohr

384. “We see what we are ready to see, expect to see, and even desire to see.”

— Richard Rohr

385. “But in this book, I use “prayer” as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself.”

— Richard Rohr

386. “But which should come first, grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first. All we can do is get out of the way and then the soul takes its natural course.”

— Richard Rohr

387. “Hate can be helpful to certain causes. It unites a group quickly, it gives a person identity – even if it is a negative one – and, most of all, it takes away doubt and all free-floating anxiety. It gives us a place to stand that feels superior and in control. Hate settles the dust and ambiguity that none of us like. Hate is much more common, and more immediately effective, than love. Hate, as we will sadly see below, makes the world go ’round.”

— Richard Rohr

388. “For five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils – greed, pride, ambition, deceit, gluttony – moved to the highest levels of power and influence, even in our churches.”

— Richard Rohr

389. “The God-image, the self-image, and the world-image are deeply connected. Normally, when one of them changes, the other two have to readjust. So, when our God-image changes, then we have to change. When our world-image is adjusted, we are confused or even depressed for a while.”

— Richard Rohr

390. “For many secular people today we live in a disenchanted universe without meaning, purpose, or direction. We are aware only of what it is not. Seldom do we enjoy what it is. Probably it is only healthy religion that is prepared to answer that question. Healthy religion is an enthusiasm about what is, not an anger about what isn’t.”

— Richard Rohr

391. “To take the Scriptures seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning. Most.”

— Richard Rohr

392. “Know that things are okay as they are. This moment is as perfect as it can be. The saints called this the “sacrament of the present moment.”

— Richard Rohr

393. “No doubt you’re aware that many traditional Christians today consider the concept of universal anything – including salvation – heresy. Many do not even like the United Nations. And many Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the lines of ethnicity to determine who’s in and who’s out. I find these convictions quite strange for a religion that believes that “one God created all things.”

— Richard Rohr

394. “Each generation has to appropriate its deepest beliefs for itself. We used to say it this way: “God has no grandchildren.” Each generation must itself be realigned with God and discover the mystery for itself.”

— Richard Rohr

395. “All theologies are blasphemous in so far as they attempt to reduce God to something that can be known through the understanding by which we know other things.”

— Richard Rohr

396. “You are in a position of total powerlessness, and your ego is fighting it. All you can do is surrender and enter into this dance of unhindered dialogue, this circle of praise, this web of communion that we call the Blessed Trinity.”

— Richard Rohr

397. “The two alternatives are always exclusionary, usually in an angry way: things are either totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me, male or female, Democrat or Republican, Christian or pagan, on and on and on. The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom. It thinks it is smart because it counters your idea with an opposing idea. There is usually not much room for a “reconciling third.” I see this in myself almost every day.”

— Richard Rohr

398. “To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.”

— Richard Rohr

399. “We become what we are willing to see.”

— Richard Rohr

400. “Remember, anthropologically, religion begins with the making of a distinction between the pure and the impure. Jesus consistently ignores such a distinction. In fact, it is at the heart of almost half of his gospel actions!”

— Richard Rohr