Richard Rohr Quotes

Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.

Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul.

The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become.

People involve themselves in countless activities which they consider to be important, but they forget about one activity which is more important and necessary than any other, and which includes all other things: the improvement of their soul

Sometimes I attract roles that are necessary either for personal growth or enlightenment.

Being somebody who wants to be religious doesn't make me perfect and doesn't make me necessarily any better than anybody else. It maybe makes me better than I would have been if I didn't have that level.

My life is not separate from my music, you know? It's not like a day job that I leave and go home. It's who I am as a person and how I am trying to grow, come closer to God, be a better person.

We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.

I have my moments of insecurity and figuring out what's going on and what I'm supposed to do, but if you don't push yourself, you're not growing, so where do you go?

It's certainly not wrong to want to be a better person. God gave us that desire.

I'm just like you - I want to be a good human being. I'm doing my best, and I'm working at it. And I'm trying to be a Christian. I'm always amazed when people walk up to me and say, 'I'm a Christian.' I always think, 'Already? You've already got it?' I'm working at it. And at my age, I'll still be working at it at 96.

I'm always trying to find ways to evolve. Evolution, for me, is a very spiritual thing, getting closer to the creator, closer to God, and becoming a better version of yourself.

The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them.

When you put a seed in the ground, it doesn't stop growing after eight hours. It keeps going every minute that it's in the earth. We, too, need to keep growing every moment of every day that we are on this earth.

Progress, in the sense of acquisition, is something; but progress in the sense of being, is a great deal more. To grow higher, deeper, wider, as the years go on; to conquer difficulties, and acquire more and more power; to feel all one's faculties unfolding, and truth descending into the soul,--this makes life worth living.

We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone.

The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.

This life was not intended to be the place of our perfection, but the preparation for it.

There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.

To have more, we must first become more.

Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. What provides the motive, the energy for discipline? This force I believe to be love. I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

When every situation which life can offer is turned to the profit of spiritual growth, no situation can really be a bad one.

Grow within the flow.

Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development - begun now and ending never. And a life made true cannot confine itself - it must reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils.

When a Christian stops growing, help is needed. If you are the same Christian you were a few months ago, be careful.