If you feel loved, you can do a thousand things. If you feel rejected, everything becomes a problem.
HENRI NOUWENThe greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
More Henri Nouwen Quotes
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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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This brief lifetime is my opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.
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Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.
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Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved.
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You have to listen to the one who calls you beloved. That has to be affirmed over and over again. That is prayer – listening to the voice of the one who calls you “the beloved.”
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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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Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life…all of our life.
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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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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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We cannot make it rain but we can see to it that the rain falls on prepared soil.
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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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Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
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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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Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.
HENRI NOUWEN