The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
HENRI NOUWENPay attention to the people God puts in your path if you want to discern what God is up to in your life.
More Henri Nouwen Quotes
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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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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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Pay attention to the people God puts in your path if you want to discern what God is up to in your life.
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Our life is a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.
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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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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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For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved.
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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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Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, “I love you, too.”
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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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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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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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Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.
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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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I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.
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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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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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Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.
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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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Dare to love and to be a real friend. The love you give and receive is a reality that will lead you closer and closer to God as well as those whom God has given you to love.
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Waiting time is not wasting time. Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.
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Forgiveness changes the way we remember.
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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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We cannot make it rain but we can see to it that the rain falls on prepared soil.
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Our greatest fulfillment lies in giving ourselves to others.
HENRI NOUWEN