Best Henri Nouwen Quotes
Henri Nouwen Quotes About Hope, Love, Life, Prayer, Community, Wounded Healer, Compassion, Joy, Healing, Brokenness, Hospitality & Friendship! In addition to being a Catholic priest, Henri Nouwen was also a professor, a psychologist, and a famous writer. His birthplace was Nijkerk, the Netherlands, where Henri Nouwen was born on January 24, 1932. While studying at the Jesuit Aloysius College in The Hague, Nouwen also attended the minor seminary in Apeldoorn, where he spent a year.
As a result of Henri’s emotional and spiritual weakness, readers reacted to his revelation that he was a chosen one of God. They learned that, despite their brokenness, they were greatly loved by God. Additionally, Henri had an outstanding teaching career at some of the most prominent and influential post-secondary schools in the United States, such as Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. However, Henri’s most strongly inspired location was the polar opposite of prestige and power.
Catholic priest and skilled speaker Henri reflected the inherent contradictions of uniting life and the spirit. His sincerity was both endearing and alarming at the same time. Few spiritual authors have ever been as open and honest about their troubles and brokenness as this author. His words relate directly to our wounds and remind us that we are a completely loved child of God, scars, and everything.
He spent the several years of his life in L’Arche, a French community where individuals with various intellectual disabilities live together as companions. Sadly, he passed away in 1996. Henri Nouwen is one of the most well-known and prominent spiritual writers of his time. The spiritual growth of millions of people worldwide has been influenced and inspired by his various works.
Best Henri Nouwen Quotes
1. “Someday I would love to write about Vincent Van Gogh – his paintings and letters continue to inspire me very much.”– Henri Nouwen.
2. “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.”– Henri Nouwen.
3. “Compassion can never coexist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.”– Henri Nouwen.
4. “Letting our aloneness grow into solitude and not into loneliness is a lifelong struggle. It requires conscious choices about whom to be with, what to study, how to pray, and when we ask for counsel. But wise choices will help us to find the solitude where our hearts can grow in love.”– Henri Nouwen.
5. “Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection.”– Henri Nouwen.
6. “Solitude, whether it is connected with a physical space or not, is essential for our spiritual lives. It is not an easy place to be, since we are so insecure and fearful that we are easily distracted by whatever promises immediate satisfaction.”– Henri Nouwen.
7. “We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.”– Henri Nouwen.
8. “Prayer leads you to see new paths and to hear new melodies in the air.”– Henri Nouwen.
9. “We are called to be fruitful – not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness.”– Henri Nouwen.
10. “Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.”– Henri Nouwen.
11. “To be able to enjoy fully the many good things the world has to offer, we must be detached from them. To be detached does not mean to be indifferent or uninterested. It means to be non-possessive.”– Henri Nouwen.
12. “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.”– Henri Nouwen.
13. “Trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.”– Henri Nouwen.
14. “With a friend, we can be still and know that God is there with both of us.”– Henri Nouwen.
15. “Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.”– Henri Nouwen.
16. “Once we deeply trust that we ourselves are precious in God’s eyes, we are able to recognize the preciousness of others and their unique places in God’s heart.”– Henri Nouwen.
17. “I can be fully where I am and pay attention to the many signs of God’s love within me and around me.”– Henri Nouwen.
18. “You have to close yourself to the outside world so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain.”– Henri Nouwen.
19. “To pray means to open your hands before God.”– Henri Nouwen.
20. “God loves us without conditions but does not approve of every human behavior.”– Henri Nouwen.
21. “To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.”– Henri Nouwen.
22. “A spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ. “– Henri Nouwen.
23. “The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper.”– Henri Nouwen.
24. “The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”– Henri Nouwen.
25. “What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.”– Henri Nouwen.
26. “Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it. You discard it because you are fixed on receiving it from the same person to whom you gave it.”– Henri Nouwen.
27. “Love is based on the mutuality of the confession of our total self to each other.”– Henri Nouwen.
28. “When you have loved deeply, that love can grow even stronger after the death of the person you love.”– Henri Nouwen.
29. “The love you give and receive is a reality that will lead you closer and closer to God as well as those whom God has given you to love.”– Henri Nouwen.
30. “We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.”
– Henri Nouwen.
