Henri Nouwen Quotes

Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.

I try to take each moment at a time.

The next message you need is always right where you are.

My friend, the sufi is the friend of the present moment. To say tomorrow is not our way.

Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

Quit worrying about how everything is going to turn out. Live one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment.

Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.

When you stay in the moment, you have all the time in the world, and whatever needs to be done will be completed in the exact right time.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Presence is when you're no longer waiting for the next moment, believing that the next moment will be more fulfilling than this one.

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

I don't think about the miles that are coming down the road, I don't think about the mile I'm on right now, I don't think about the miles I've already covered. I think about what I'm doing right now, just being lost in the moment.

We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.

You can't wait for the end of your problems for you to be present. It has to be done whereever you are - which is now

Sam: For once in my life, I was here and nowhere else.

I try to live in the moment and let that moment carry me to the next great place.

So give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting . . . snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything. So next time somebody says, “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” you can reply, “That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing

Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.

When you are here and now, sitting totally, not jumping ahead, the miracle has happened. To be in the moment is the miracle.

Accept the present moment without judgement.

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

That's what yoga teaches: how to be fully present now, no matter the circumstance.

That's what I think is the biggest challenge, is just being still and learning how to just be present in that stillness and not over do it, not over act.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?