Richard Rohr Quotes

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

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

He has turned my life around by 180 degrees, I still don't understand why Shiva has blessed me so much. I believe he'll bless the worst of us first because we need it the most.

I never thought of it as God. I didn't know what to call it. I don't believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them.

As much wrong as I did in life and as many people as I hurt, I can say that God never stopped talking to me. I just stopped listening.

Here's good news: God is even more committed to your change, your growth, and your transformation than you are.

She said that by introducing me to all these great things, Mary Elizabeth gained a “superior position” that she wouldn’t need if she was confident about herself. She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don’t, nothing will work out the way they want.

God uses prayer to educate His people and to produce holiness of character in them.

Get up; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your life from Him, and then go about your work and be yourself.

When I was a teenager, I was trying to please people. I kept changing who I was to please the people I was with. And so once I just decided I wasn't going to do that anymore. I was going to live my life to please God. And so from that day to this, that's been my aim. Some people don't understand, but you can't please everybody anyway.

In the search for our best selves, several questions will guide our thinking: Am I what I want to be? Am I closer to the Savior today than I was yesterday? Will I be closer yet tomorrow? Do I have the courage to change for the better?

Whatever God wants to do through you, He will do in you first. You've got to be what you want to see.

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

The only thing one can usually change in one's situation is oneself. And yet one can't change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

Jesus always pointed people towards a better version of themselves - particularly when they'd failed.

Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

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.

My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

The best defense against democracy is to distract people.

No one will be offended if we tell them that they are good people who could be a little better. The offense comes when we tell them that they - and we - are ungodly people who cannot impress God or escape his tribunal. Until our preaching of the law has exposed our hearts and God's holiness at that profound level, our hearers will never flee to Christ alone for safety even if they come to us for advice.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

It is also in the interests of a tyrant to make his subjects poo...the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education.