Henri Nouwen Quotes

It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.

People may call what happens at midlife 'a crisis,' but it's not. It's an unraveling - a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you're 'supposed' to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.

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.

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.

I came to the conclusion that unless I found myself and became the change I wanted to see in the world - as Gandhi said - I couldn't contribute much, nor would there be anything fulfilling or meaningful in my life. So I went on a spiritual search.

It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

This journey has always been about reaching your own other shore no matter what it is, and that dream continues.

The longest journey is the journey inwards. Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest for the source of his being.

The spiritual path - is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don't know it.

I just realized one day that I was so unhappy. And not only that, but I didn't even like the person that I was. I didn't even know who I was. And so 'Shatter Me' is about first discovering what was under the shell and then learning to love that person that was under it. And then not being afraid to break free.

In my early shows, I wanted to put myself through a new childhood, disintegrating my whole identity to let the real one emerge.

Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.

When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left.

To grow up is to find the small part you are playing in the extraordinary drama written by somebody else.

Life is finding yourself. It is a spirit development.

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

women are born twice.

Our lives are our mythic journeys, and our happy endings are still to be won.

Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.

We don't know all the reasons that propel us on a spiritual journey, but somehow our life compels us to go.

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.

What are we after all our dreams, after all our memories?

Scars are souvenirs you never lose, the past is never far, did you lose yourself somewhere out there, did you get to be a star, and don't it make you sad to know that life is more than who you are?