Henri Nouwen Quotes:
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
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
Henri Nouwen
Prayer is the most concrete way to make our home in God.
Henri Nouwen
Perhaps nothing helps us make the movement from our little selves to a larger world than remembering God in gratitude. Such a perspective puts God in view in all of life, not just in the moments we set aside for worship or spiritual disciplines. Not just in the moments when life seems easy.
Henri Nouwen
To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer.
Henri Nouwen
Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Henri Nouwen
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.
Henri Nouwen
Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.
Henri Nouwen
Ministry is the least important thing. You cannot not minister if you are in communion with God and live in community.
Henri Nouwen
Jesus didn’t say, ‘Blessed are those who care for the poor.’ He said, ‘Blessed are we where we are poor, where we are broken.’ It is there that God loves us deeply and pulls us into deeper communion with himself.
Henri Nouwen
In their poverty, the mentally handicapped reveal God to us and hold us close to the gospel.
Henri Nouwen
The evangelical movement has become just a bit victimized by a success-oriented culture, wanting the church – like the corporation – to be successful.
Henri Nouwen
The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.
Henri Nouwen
The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
Henri Nouwen
One of the main tasks of theology is to find words that do not divide but unite, that do not create conflict but unity, that do not hurt but heal.
Henri Nouwen