This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.
HENRI NOUWENThe great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
More Henri Nouwen Quotes
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The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don’t see the results.
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Prayer is first of all listening to God. It’s openness. God is always speaking; he’s always doing something.
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Dear God, I am so afraid to open my clenched fists! Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to? Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands? Please help me to gradually open my hands and to discover that I am not what I own, but what you want to give me.
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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.
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Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
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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.
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Our greatest fulfillment lies in giving ourselves to others.
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In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.
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Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
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Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.
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Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.
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Your heart is greater than your wounds.
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Those who keep speaking about the sun while walking under a cloudy sky are messengers of hope, the true saints of our day.
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Spiritual maturity is not knowing what to do with your whole life, but just knowing what to do next.
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Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.
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You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.
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It is in solitude that we discover that being is more important than having and that we are worth more than the results of our efforts. In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended but a gift to be shared.
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Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.
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When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.
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The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
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Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.
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If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.
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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.
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Those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. 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.
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One of the tragedies of our life is that we keep forgetting who we are.
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Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.
HENRI NOUWEN