Richard Rohr Quotes

We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness.

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

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

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.

Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.

There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough.

The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.

Love is luring us forward ... to the fullness of our own being

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.

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

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over.

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.

Am I willing to walk into the wilds of my interior life without knowing what I'll find?

All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given - which is ourselves!

Loving God, allow me to be a sheep at least once in a while, and never let me forget that most of my life I have been a goat.

Religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

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

When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.

God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change.

Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God.

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.

The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves - by themselves - and in themselves.

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.

The people who know God well - mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator.

There is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.

Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.

God comes to us disguised as our life.

God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history.

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

Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.

The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

When we can see the image of God where we don't want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

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

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.

Every viewpoint is a view from a point.

Creation is a process that is still happening and we're in on it! We are a part of this endless creativity of God.

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.

We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God's very self.

Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.

We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.

I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you.

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better.

Moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism.

The eyes with which you will look back at God will be the same eyes with which God first looked at you.

Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.

Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.

All mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning.

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.

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

Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.

You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.

Advent is not about a sentimental waiting for the Baby Jesus,

Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy.

The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them.

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

life seems to be a collision of opposites.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God

Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes a mystical matter, rather than a moral matter.

Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us.

Mature prayer always breaks into gratitude.

Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in - but only to be moved out from.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

I am who I am in the eyes of God-
nothing more and nothing less.

If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.

If you don't transform your suffering, you'll transmit it.

If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.

Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.

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

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

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

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.

God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself.

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.

this preoccupation with order, control,

It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.

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

God for us, God alongside us, God within us.