Henri Nouwen Quotes

There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight.

The kind of support the down-and-out need is the kind we have always refused them, the kind that would mean engaging with them not as objects of contempt, but as fellow human beings.

Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.

Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another

Strangers are an endangered species.

All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious.

A compassionate open home is part of Christian responsibility, and should be practiced up to the level of capacity.

Her face was a stranger’s face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.

As Christians, we have an additional reason to love and serve the poor; for in them we see the face and the flesh of Christ, who made himself poor so to enrich us with his poverty.

I ... am endeavoring ... to attend to my own duty only as a Christian. ... let us take care that our Christianity, though put to the test ... be not shaken, and that our love for things really good wax not cold.

Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.

Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on - to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

If we don't learn to live with one another we will not live. We will either love each other as neighbors or we won't be. I believe that it is an insult to me as a Christian to say that I cannot love as neighbor somebody who thinks differently than I do.

Manuel will show you to your rooms - if you're lucky.

Presents of love fear not to be ill taken of strangers.

That's why God created marriage, so people wouldn't have to fight with strangers.

Christians should not be hostile, they should not hate, they should not judge, and they should not condemn. But they also must not shy away from real Truth and real Christianity. Just because so many have “itching ears” and “will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” does not mean Christians should be willing to scratch that itch.

My parents would always tell me that I should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him.

I really love to be with people. It's nice, that. To have achieved sudden intimacy with strangers is perhaps the most human thing you can do. We all love our friends and families, as much as we hate them. When you can achieve intimacy with strangers, it's very exciting and heartening.

A Christian is not his own master, since all his time belongs to God.

‎Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for - you or me - and we all know who they'll choose.

You never know when you might come home and find Mam sitting by the fire chatting with a woman and a child, strangers. Always a woman and child. Mam finds them wandering the streets and if they ask, Could you spare a few pennies, miss? her heart breaks. She never has money so she invites them home for tea and a bit of fried bread and if it's a bad night she'll let them sleep by the fire on a pile of rags in the corner. The bread she gives them always means less for us and if we complain she says there are always people worse off and we can surely spare a little from what we have.

But I believe the greatest enemy of the Bible is the so-called Christian who simply ignores the Bible or disregards it.