Top 35 Ronald Rolheiser Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sanctity has to do with gratitude. To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

2. “You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you, “I love you!” These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

3. “We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

4. “Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one’s back on many others.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

5. “This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be gracious and mellow in the face of bitterness, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal? That’s the litmus test of love.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

6. “True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

7. “It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

8. “Becoming like Jesus is as much as about having a relaxed and joyful heart as it is about believing and doing the right thing, as much about proper energy as about proper truth.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

9. “Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

10. “Resiliency is the key to love.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

11. “Gratitude is the root of all virtue.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

12. “Anyone who deeply and honestly shares with us the struggles of her heart, her pains and fears, helps to make us more free. This is so because her story is really, in some way, our story. It is everyone’s story.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

13. “The highest compliment we can give to God, our Creator, is to thoroughly enjoy the gift of life. One should never look a gift universe in the mouth! The best way to pay for a beautiful moment is to enjoy it.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

14. “The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

15. “You feel your own life – your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to – and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: “God, it feels great to be alive!” That’s delight.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

16. “Success has little to teach us during the second half of life.5 It continues to feel good, but now it is often more an obstacle to maturity than a positive stimulus toward it.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

17. “Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

18. “In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

19. “When a person falls out of proper harmony with God, it inevitably leads to disharmony with others.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

20. “Being lonely does not mean that we are abnormal, love-starved, oversexed, or alienated. Perhaps all it means is that we are incurably human and sensitive to the fact that God made us for an ecstatic togetherness in a body with divine love and with all other persons of sincere will.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

21. “We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

22. “Karl Rahner, a twentieth-century admirer of Augustine, once said that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that, in this life, all symphonies must remain unfinished.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

23. “Spirituality is about what we do about the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

24. “We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

25. “Faith is not a question of basking in the certainty that there is a God and that God is taking care of us. Many of us are never granted this kind of assurance. Certitude is not the real substance of faith. Faith is a way of seeing things.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

26. “Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

27. “All of us experience, to a greater or lesser extent, a loneliness that results from not having enough anchors, enough absolutes, and enough permanent roots to make us feel secure and stable in a world characterized by transience.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

28. “Evolution works through this principle: the survival of the fittest. One of the essential elements of Christian discipleship demands that we work for this principle: the survival of the weakest and the gentlest.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

29. “One of our deepest struggles in life is dealing with the unconscious anxiety inside of us that pressures us to try to give ourselves significance and immortality. There is always the inchoate gnawing: do something to guarantee that something of your life will last. It is this propensity that tempts us to try to find meaning and significance through success and accumulation. But in the end it does not work, irrespective of how great our successes have been.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

30. “Without making any moral judgements whatsoever, one can say that self-indulgence and excessive self-preoccupation are the antithesis of genuine awareness.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

31. “Charity is appeased when some rich person gives money to the poor while justice asks why one person can be that rich when so many are poor.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

32. “Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

33. “Alienation results because human beings speak the same language only when they appear to each other as they really are, vulnerable, without impressively constructed towers. Vulnerability is that space within which human beings can truly meet each other and speak the same language. Sin and pride serve to destroy this space and drive us away from each other, leaving us to babble in our own language as we scatter to our respective corners of the earth.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

34. “Above all, such an understanding of loneliness should help liberate us. It should teach us that loneliness is both a good and a natural force in our lives.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

35. “We all have this place, a place in the heart, where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. From that place our own kisses issue forth, as do our tears. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to come into; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of our compassion and the place of our rage. In that place we are holy.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

36. “But within ourselves we can experience a real difference between restlessness and solitude. What is that difference? It is the difference between living in freedom rather than compulsion; restfulness rather than restlessness; patience rather than impatience; inwardness rather than frenzied outwardness; altruism rather than greediness; authentic friendship rather than possessive clinging; and empathy rather than apathy.3.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

37. “Write a book,” he told me, “that I can give to my adult children to explain why I still believe in God and why I still go to church – and that I can read on days when I am no longer sure why I believe or go to church.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

38. “As we age we need to forgive – forgive those who hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own mistakes, forgive life for having been unfair, and then forgive God for seemingly not having protected us – all of this so that we do not die bitter and angry, which is perhaps the greatest religious imperative of all.”

— Ronald Rolheiser

39. “Jesus does not just ask us to give in charity to the poor, he also asks us to work at correcting all the social, political, and economic structures that disadvantage the poor and help keep them poor.28.”

— Ronald Rolheiser