Top 60 Rowan Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.”

— Rowan Williams

2. “The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world.”

— Rowan Williams

3. “Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.”

— Rowan Williams

4. “Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.”

— Rowan Williams

5. “Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.”

— Rowan Williams

6. “Keeping our eyes on journey’s end is what we need – the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.”

— Rowan Williams

7. “St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return.”

— Rowan Williams

8. “Religion has always been a matter of community building; a matter of building precisely those relations of compassion, fellow feeling and – I dare to use the word – inclusion, which would otherwise be absent from our societies.”

— Rowan Williams

9. “The question, ‘How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?’ is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren’t – indeed it would be wrong if it weren’t.”

— Rowan Williams

10. “One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest.”

— Rowan Williams

11. “Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners.”

— Rowan Williams

12. “It takes the whole church to know the whole truth.”

— Rowan Williams

13. “Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.”

— Rowan Williams

14. “The world’s creation has a beginning from the world’s point of view, not from God’s.”

— Rowan Williams

15. “I value unity because I believe we learn truth from each other in this process.”

— Rowan Williams

16. “Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can’t do, fear or even disgust at growing old.”

— Rowan Williams

17. “Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor – but the Church is not a campaign.”

— Rowan Williams

18. “Perhaps baptism really ought to have some health warnings attached to it: ‘If you take this step, if you go into these depths, it will be transfiguring, exhilarating, life-giving and very, very dangerous.’ To be baptized into Jesus is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus’ first disciples discovered that in the Gospels, and his disciples have gone on discovering it ever since.”

— Rowan Williams

19. “So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.”

— Rowan Williams

20. “The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity’s selfishness.”

— Rowan Williams

21. “Serving democracy and nourishing the common good is, for the media, something that requires not only attacking corrupt secrecies in a society, but also defending non-corrupt communication.”

— Rowan Williams

22. “It is, as some modern Christian thinkers have said, what makes the Church what it really is. For that short time, when we gather as God’s guests at God’s table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be – a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God.”

— Rowan Williams

23. “To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context.”

— Rowan Williams

24. “I have to go on being a priest and bishop, that is, to celebrate God and what God has done in Jesus, and to offer in God’s name whatever I can discern of God’s perspective on the world around – something which involves both challenge and comfort.”

— Rowan Williams

25. “To be a Christian is to believe we are commanded and authorised to say certain things to the world; to say things that will make disciples of all nations.”

— Rowan Williams

26. “We must support government coercion over enforcing international protocols and speed limits on motorways if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die.”

— Rowan Williams

27. “A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us.”

— Rowan Williams

28. “I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we’ve got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church.”

— Rowan Williams

29. “The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can’t leave, you are in effect a captive.”

— Rowan Williams

30. “We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.”

— Rowan Williams

31. “In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that.”

— Rowan Williams

32. “A public is a necessary fiction.”

— Rowan Williams

33. “Let’s cut to the chase, the sharia controversy. I don’t think I, or my colleagues, predicted just how enormous the reaction would be. I failed to find the right words. I succeeded in confusing people. I’ve made mistakes – that’s probably one of them.”

— Rowan Williams

34. “It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God’s call to reveal to the world what God’s purpose is for humanity.”

— Rowan Williams

35. “And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God’s loving wisdom become actualities – interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.”

— Rowan Williams

36. “Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest.”

— Rowan Williams

37. “The past is what the present is doing now.”

— Rowan Williams

38. “It does not matter to the killers if their victims are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Humanist what matters is that they show that they can kill where they please.”

— Rowan Williams

39. “What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.”

— Rowan Williams

40. “It’s a moral question.”

— Rowan Williams

41. “How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?”

— Rowan Williams

42. “In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.”

— Rowan Williams

43. “In the context of interfaith encounter, we need to bring to the surface how our actual beliefs shape what we do – not simply to agree that kindness is better than cruelty.”

— Rowan Williams

44. “A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.”

— Rowan Williams

45. “Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.”

— Rowan Williams

46. “In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention.”

— Rowan Williams

47. “To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one’s own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.”

— Rowan Williams

48. “If there is one thing I long for above all else, it’s that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture.”

— Rowan Williams

49. “Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.”

— Rowan Williams

50. “My visit this autumn is an opportunity to continue that rich tradition of visits between Canterbury and Rome.”

— Rowan Williams