Richard Rohr Quotes

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.

[Prayer] takes no time, but it occupies all our time.

Prayer is in all things, in all gestures.

People who pray stand receptive before the world. They no longer grab but caress, they no longer bite but kiss, they no longer examine but admire.

If you pay sufficient attention, everything in life is magnificent, everything is a doorway to the Divine.

There is no need to get to a place of prayer; pray wherever you are.

We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source.

We tend to think of meditation in only one way. But life itself is a meditation.

When you recognize the festive and the still moments as moments of prayer, then you gradually realize that to pray is to live.

You don't need a special place to meditate. You can transcend anywhere in the world. The unified field is here, and there, and everywhere.

I don't have to go to a mountain to meditate. I'm meditative in every moment of my life.

Everything can become a meditation if you live it totally and intensely. And then your life becomes whole.

Prayer does not demand that we interrupt our work, but that we continue working as if it were a prayer.

We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

The witness is always in the here and now and it lives in each instant of living. To be in the witness is to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without clinging, without opinions.

I pray. Prayer is a time to connect with the divine, but also time, I'm sure, to concentrate one's thoughts, to meditate, and to imagine what might be.

Only when all images of Earth are hushed and the clamor of the senses be stilled, and the soul has passed beyond thought of self, can the eternal wisdom be revealed to the mystic who seeks that highest communion with the unseen.

I’ve got to push everything out of mind save the name of Jesus. I say His name over and over again, for as long as fifteen minutes, until I find my soul suspended in what the ancient Celtic Christians called a “thin place”–a state where the boundary between heaven and earth, divine and human, dissolves. You could say that I use the name of Jesus as my koan.

There are some people who, in order not to pray use as an excuse the fact that life is so hectic that it prevents us from praying. This cannot be. Prayer does not demand that we interrupt our work, but that we continue working as if it were a prayer. It is not necessary to always be in meditation, nor to consciously experience the sensation that we are talking to God, no matter how nice that would be. What matters is being with Him, living in Him, in His will. To love with a pure heart, to love everybody, especially to live the poor, is a twenty-four hour prayer.

Centering prayer is a training in letting go.

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

To be choiceless is to be in meditation. To be choiceless is to enter the eternal.

And then, in that regal silence, finally - I began to meditate on (and with) God.

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments.