Henri Nouwen Quotes

Let sannyas be the turning point. That's what sannyas is all about: a return journey. One starts moving inwards rather than moving outwards.

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

Spiritual principles do not change, but we do.

Amputechture' is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person.

When all life is seen as divine, everyone grows wings.

Trying harder doesn’t work for me. Slowly I’ve learned to pray for God’s help and He has become my greatest love and desire.

As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.

Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God.

Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.

Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his heart is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will someday reach to heaven.

We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.

We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves.

Each one of us could describe his or her life as a sacred journey. You are journeying from the beginning to the end, and what makes it sacred is that in the process of this journey you encounter the holy in various forms which, unless you have your eyes open, you might not even notice.

And what he ought to see, hear and understand is truth-eternal truth-and then practice it. That is conversion

The transformation toward eternal life is gradual. The heavy gross energy of body, mind, and spirit must first be purified and uplifted. When the energy ascends... then self mastery can be sought.

I don't want to be like you. I look for the pure of heart, and the ones that have made a start.

Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting - an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.

I was looking for something within Judaism that had a spiritual nature and not just a religious nature. So my trainer at the time was the one who took me to the Kabbalah center on my 40th birthday. I was like, "Oh, this is so cool." I was just ready for it. I was ready for something different.

As your consciousness becomes more settled, all your life patterns change. What religions have called sin will disappear from your life, and what they have called virtue will automatically flow from your being, from your actions. But they have been doing just vice versa: first change the acts... It is as if you are in a dark house, and you are stumbling over furniture and over things, and you are told that unless you stop stumbling, light is not possible.

Human society is a ceaseless growth, and unfoldment in terms of spirituality.