Henri Nouwen Love Quotes and Sayings, Photo credit: Wikipedia
Henri Nouwen Love Quotes and Sayings
#1 Out of solitude: Three meditations on the Christian life
1. Still, when we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. 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-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares.
#2 August 30, You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living
2. Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.
#3 The inner voice of love: A journey through anguish to freedom
3. Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body’s deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body’s superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
#4 The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming
4. The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realized.
#5 January 7, The Gift of Friendship, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
5. Friendship is being with the other in joy and sorrow, even when we cannot increase the joy or decrease the sorrow.
#6 Henri Nouwen Society [S]
6. In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.
#7 Here and now: Living in the Spirit
7. If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen (Nouen), (Nijkerk, January 24, 1932 – Hilversum, September 21, 1996) was a Dutch-born Catholic priest and writer who authored 40 books about spirituality.
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Sayings by Henri Nouwen
#1 Reaching out: The three movements of the spiritual life [S]
1. We cannot change the world by a new plan, project or idea. We cannot even change other people by our convictions, stories, advice and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, to lay aside their occupations and preoccupations and to listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own center.
#2 Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit [S]
2. Somewhere we know that without silence, words lose their meaning; that without listening, speaking no longer heals; that without distance, closeness cannot cure.
#3 Here and now: Living in the Spirit [S]
3. As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to the need to put people and things in their “right” place.
#4 January 5, Living the Moment to the Fullest, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
4. Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else. Let’s be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.
#5 Here and now: Living in the Spirit [S]
5. Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
#6 The Cup of Joy, Can You Drink the Cup? [S]
6. We need to remind each other that the cup of sorrow is also the cup of joy, that precisely what causes us sadness can become the fertile ground for gladness. Indeed, we need to be angels for each other, to give each other strength and consolation. Because only when we fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it.
#7 January 6, Spiritual Choices, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
7. We have very little control over what happens in our lives, but we have a lot of control over how we integrate and remember what happens.
#8 The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles
8. First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.
#9 Life of the Beloved [S]
9. How different would our life be were we truly able to trust that it multiplied in being given away! How different would our life be if we could believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it . . . and that—even then—there will be leftovers!
#10 The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming
10. Gratitude, however, goes beyond the “mine” and “thine” and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift.
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Unsourced Quotes by Henri Nouwen
1. Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering, because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving. When the child leaves home, when the husband or wife leaves for a long period of time or for good, when the beloved friend departs to another country or dies … the pain of the leaving can tear us apart.
Still, if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear, life stronger than death, hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.
2. A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
3. When we give generously, with an abundance mentality, what we give away will multiply.
4. Our greatest fulfillment lies in giving ourselves to others.
5. You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.