Henri Nouwen Quotes

Giving jump starts our relationship with God. It opens our fists so we can receive what God has for us.

I'm not a fan of religion. Religion ties people up and binds them and puts them back in chains but faith - true relationship - releases us to be all what God ever intended us to be. That's what I'm interested in.

I had a deep experience of God's love for me.

Many stop short of a divine encounter because they are satisfied with good theology. The word of God is to lead us to the God of the word.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.

Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God.

Jesus represents the possibilities of a new dimension of existence that transcends all the boundaries that restrict us from opening ourselves to God and allowing this source of love to flow through us.

Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so.

I was raised Catholic, and I knew of Him and certainly what He did, but I never truly experienced knowing Him.

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

The melody of a religious feeling is the music of life itself. To those who do not hear it I could not explain what it sounds like ... If the spark isn't smoldering somewhere inside one, no efforts can ever bring it into existence. Water cannot catch fire.

O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen.

What it takes to reach this place I'm speaking about is to be in spirit. You shift who you are away from what you have, what you do, what your reputation is, what people think of you, and all of that ego-based thinking. You shift into the understanding that who you are is a piece of God - who you are is a piece of the source - and when you stay connected to that in your thoughts you inspire others to do the same.

As I've gone into soul and soul-land, and I connect with my soul and my ego, and my life is colored by my soul - people can identify from their ego, which is who they thought they are. The soul, which is who they really are, if they choose that transfer to the soul, then you live in an ocean of love.

For when I came into the silent assemblies of God's people I felt a secret power among them which touched my heart; and as I gave way unto it I found the evil weakening in me and the good raised up

Your trials did not come to punish you, but to awaken you - to make you realise that you are a part of Spirit and that just behind the sparks of your life is the Flame of Infinity.

Life didn't just happen to them. They experienced life at a deeper level than I had ever experienced it. I had been a radical, a left-wing politico, and meeting the Indian people made me realize that the politics of the left and the right were so much less important than the politics of the heart and the spirit.

True success is ... the experience of the miraculous. It is the unfolding of the divinity within us.

The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is the place of response, of unifying one's heart, mind, soul and feet around a decision.

Sometimes we need a personal crisis to reinforce in our minds what we really value and cherish. The scriptures are filled with examples of people facing crises before learning how to better serve God and others. Perhaps if you, too, search your hearts and courageously assess the priorities in your life, you may discover, as I did, that you need a better balance among your priorities.

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

I want to have a lasting experience of God.

Prayer is not designed to inform God, but to give man a sight of his misery; to humble man's heart, to excite his desire, to inflame his faith, to animate his hope, to raise his soul from earth to heaven.