Henri Nouwen Quotes

It is a rose planted in your heart, and as it's thorns tear you, so does it thrive and flower

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise.

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother — even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.

He who would love much has also much to suffer.

I'd rather bleed with cuts of love than live without any scars.

You can't shut off the risk and the pain without losing the love that remains.

Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right. Perhaps the wise spurn one to remain safe from the other, but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without.

Maybe I could have loved you better. Maybe you should have loved me more. Maybe our hearts were just next in line. Maybe everything breaks sometime.

Love always hurts. That’s one thing I know you know. But it’s worth it. That’s what you don’t know. Yet.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, so shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.

My mum has a lot of pain in her heart to where love is pain for her. But I teach my kids love is beautiful.

Everybody writes about love and cheating and heartbreak. We've done all that.

Pain is the biggest power of love.

There are only two kinds of pain: too much love or too little.

The truth may hurt, but love helps ease the pain.

To live in love is life's greatest challenge. It requires more sublety, flexibility, sensitivity, understanding, acceptance, tolerance, knowledge and strength than any other human endeavor.

It's like my garden, love. Everything grows. Including love. And with that growing everyday how can you expect missing her to ever fade away? Everything builds, including our ability to cope with it. That's how we keep going.

Love inevitably forces one to look at their own life, and that's either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what the person has going on or what they've experienced. The search for love and heartbreak is a fairly university condition and everybody will take away from it something different.

Love's the only house big enough for all the pain in the world.

The heart was made to be broken.

Where there is love, there is bound to be heartache.

I fear feeling my heart break a second time, because I'm not sure I could survive it. I'd rather live alone than risk the pain.