Henri J.M. Nouwen quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Henri J.M. Nouwen

Henri J.M. Nouwen Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Henri J.M. Nouwen on Wise Famous Quotes.

Jesus changes our history from a random series of sad incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity for a change of heart.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

The Father's love does not force itself on the beloved.

Joy never denies the sadness, but transforms it to a fertile soil for more joy.

Becoming a child is living the Beatitudes and so finding the narrow gate into the Kingdom.

As the beloved son, I have to claim my full dignity and begin preparing myself to become the father.

Emit gratitude as though it was done

Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.

The soul of the artist cannot remain hidden.

coming home" meant, for me, walking step by step toward the One who awaits me with open arms and wants to hold me in an eternal embrace. I

There is within you a lamb and a lion. Spiritual maturity is the ability to let lamb and lion lie down together.

The immense joy in welcoming back the lost son hides the immense sorrow that has gone before. The

Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.

Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring, and renewing.

Spiritual fatherhood has nothing to do with power or control. It is a fatherhood of compassion.

Have courage" therefore means "Let your center speak.

Jesus wants to make it clear that the God of whom he speaks is a God of compassion who joyously welcomes repentant sinners into his house.

Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led into places where we would rather not go.

Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.

Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it

If God is compassionate, then certainly those who love God should be compassionate as well.

Joy and resentment cannot coexist.

The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation ...

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.

Whether I am the younger son or the elder son, God's only desire is to bring me home.

Real care means the willingness to help each other in making our brokenness into the gateway to joy.

One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God's forgiveness.

Real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common. When

I am beginning to experience that an unconditional, total love of God makes a very articulate, alert, and attentive love for the neighbor possible.

Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.

It is hard for me to imagine what it means to be a complete foreigner, a person to whom no one shows any sign of recognition.

I am convinced that healing is often so difficult because we don't want to know the pain.

God is there. God's light is there. God's forgiveness is there. God's boundless love is there.

When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.

Peace is first of all the art of being.

The journey of the younger son cannot be separated from that of his elder brother.

The "distant country" is the world in which everything considered holy at home is disregarded.

By prayer, community is created as well as expressed.

Jesus lived this joy of the Father's house to the full.

One of the tragedies of our life is that we keep forgetting who we are

It was hard for me to see God at work in my life when I was running from class to class and traveling from place to place.

Where does my complete flowering as a human being connect with the needs of the world?

Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)

The world is evil only when you become its slave.

Let's dare to enter into an intimate relationship with God without fear, trusting that we will receive love and always more love.

Here is a home for you; maybe you need us. All my desires to be useful, successful, and productive revolted.

Preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community

Our individual as well as communal lives are so deeply molded by our worries about tomorrow that today hardly can be experienced.

Jesus, the Son of God, is the man of sorrows, but also the man of complete joy.

Getting answers to my questions is not the goal of the spiritual life. Living in the presence of God is the greater call.

Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.

I witness many signs of hope. I don't have to wait until all is well, but I can celebrate every little hint of the Kingdom that is at hand.

Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.

As Father, the only authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion.

To care for others requires an ever-increasing acceptance.

First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.

In Christ we live as God's beloved before we were born and after we have died; all the circumstances in between will not negate that. Jean

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

Today worrying means to be occupied and preoccupied with many things, while at the same time being bored, resentful, depressed, and very lonely.

Whatever happens to me in life, I must believe that somewhere, In the mess or madness of it all, There is a sacred potential -

Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.

Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without discipline ends in sentimental romanticism.

Death is not the total dissolution or our identity but the way to its fullest revelation.

Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are a Devine choice.

A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this sense of solidarity.

Thus, our brokenness can become a gateway to new life.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Becoming like the heavenly Father is not just one important aspect of Jesus' teaching, it is the very heart of his message.

truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder than giving it.

When I look through God's eyes at my lost self and discover God's joy at my coming home, then my life may become less anguished and more trusting.

We are called to witness, always with our lives and sometimes with our words, to the great things God has done for us.

Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life's hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation.

You can only seek God when you have already found God. The desire for God's unconditional love is the fruit of having been touched by that love.

when God created man and woman in his own image, he saw that "it was very good," and, despite the dark voices, no man or woman can ever change that.

We want to live as people chosen, blessed, and broken, and thus become food for the world.

I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work.

Our greatest fulfillment lies in giving ourselves to others.

The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man.

What I do know with unwavering certainty is the heart of the father. It is a heart of limitless mercy.

Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.

The Christian leader cannot simply be persons who have well informed opinions about the burning issues of our time.

Action with and for those who suffer is the concrete expression of the compassionate life and the final criterion of being a Christian.

People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

When we worry, we have our hearts in the wrong place.

The great movement of the spiritual life is from a deaf, nonhearing life to a life of listening.

God is the father who watches and waits for his children, runs out to meet them, embraces them, pleads with them, begs and urges them to come home.

A spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.

I now see that the hands that forgive, console, heal, and offer a festive meal must become my own.

One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.

When we face death with hope, we can live life with generosity.

There are many elder sons and elder daughters who are lost while still at home.

God should be sought, but we cannot find God. We can only be found by him.

Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love.

We need you to be a father who can claim for himself the authority of true compassion.

Prayer, which is breathing with the Spirit of Jesus, leads us to this immense knowledge.

Spiritual reading, therefore, is slow, deliberate, meditative reading in which we allow the words to penetrate our heart and question our spirit.

The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.