Compassion can never coexist with judgement because judgement creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.
HENRI NOUWENLearning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.
More Henri Nouwen Quotes
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This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.
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Forgiveness changes the way we remember.
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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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God, help me to see others not as enemies or as ungodly but rather as thirsty people. And give me the courage and compassion to offer your Living Water, which alone quenches deep thirst.
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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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Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
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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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The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
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Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.
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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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Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
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My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.
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In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.
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Community means that people come together around the table, not just to feed their bodies, but to feed their minds and their relationships.
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Waiting time is not wasting time. Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.
HENRI NOUWEN