Richard Rohr Quotes

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

There is much in Christianity which can be subjected to exact analysis. But the ultimate things are shrouded in the silent mysteries of God.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the nature of God and the nature of man.

And how does God speak to you?" "In the language of everything that is beautiful.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.

Every good and true Christian should understand that wherever he may find the truth it is his Lord's.

Religion is a fascinating black hole to me.

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.

Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.

Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.