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.

Waiting does not exist in the experience of those who recognize the presence of love wherever they are.

I travel so much and am always living out of a suitcase, so my favorite saying is 'Wherever you go, there you are'. I love it because it's reassuring to me that you have to live in the moment wherever you happen to be.

It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.

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.

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.

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

It isn't the great big pleasures that count the most; it's making a great deal out of the little ones--I've discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now. Not to be for ever regretting the past, or anticipating the future; but to get the most that you can out of this very instant.

All the happiness and fulfillment that humans yearn for exists in the present moment.

Without our stories, we are not only able to act clearly and fearlessly, we are also a friend, a listener. We are people living happy lives. We are appreciation and gratitude that have become as natural as breath itself. Happiness is the natural state for someone who knows that there's nothing to know and that we already have everything we need, right here now.

I'm not trying to find answers anymore. I'm trying to live what I know.

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.

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.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else is the perhaps most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.

So, it's good to be here, wherever I am.

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.

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

In this moment, you have everything you need, and life is just a series of moments.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

The joy is in the journey, not the destination. We have a better chance of seeing where we are when we stop trying to get somewhere else.

Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.