Richard Rohr Quotes

I speak to people who have been through so much more.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

But my experience is that people who have been through painful, difficult times are filled with compassion.

Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice.

My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.

If you stay in the mainstream of life, in other words, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines. Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate. In other words, you hold onto your values, but you do it much more inclusively, humbly and in an open ended way. Suffering takes you there.

Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

We're always attracted to characters who are people we could identify with and yet are put through incredibly tortured or difficult circumstances - the idea being that you don't really know who you are until you've been tested or suffered in some way.

Please remember, no matter what you go through in life, somebody else might have it harder.

One of the things that I try to do when I have a tough time with anything - whatever it may be - is just look at someone else's situation. Here in Staten Island, look, I have people that have children that haven't been back in their home for 18 months after Sandy. They lost every worldly possession.

I try to show that I have no fear. When you grow up hungry, you're not afraid of anything.

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

I got hit a lot. I'm glad I lived through it.

When I was growing up, my mother, who had been through a lot of terrible things in life, taught me that when life is tough your instinct is to close your heart. But if you can accept what happened and reach out to someone, there will always be someone less fortunate, or someone that can bring a solution and help your life.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

To go through the agonizing process of learning how to walk again and write again and speak again makes you much more empathetic to people.

When our TV screens are filled with heartbreaking images of suffering, we have to dig deep inside ourselves in order to keep going.

I knew what it was to be poor... my mother worried about putting food on the table. I knew what it was to feel excluded and shut out, but I also knew what it was to experience love and generosity.

I'm from Colombia, and we've been through a lot of hard situations.

You know, I've been hit with a Greb boot in the face and I've been spat on. And my kids light up when they hear these stories. It really takes their minds off their troubles.

I've been through so much in my life. I really don't like the feeling sorry for me, the pity.

Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.

If you torture a man as I was tortured he will learn more about love than you could ever ­imagine, and that has left me ­vulnerable.