Richard Rohr Quotes

Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.

I like to sit on things and digest them and then I'll figure out my next move, but I never said I was right for doing anything.

I didn't know what was going through my mind.

Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.

This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

I don't really look back or forward too much. That's not to say I live in the moment, because I struggle with that as well.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

I think so much of real life is this avoidance of getting into the not knowing. So much of my life, I've been running from just admitting that I don't know.

To be okay with not knowing is a sign of a mature person and a mature society.

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything.

silence is very moving to youth, for who knows what it hides?

Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes.

The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now

Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it

I think it is very useful to know ourselves, but when we start naming and labeling, that is dangerous, that gets problematic. It negates that things are always changing. Besides, it's hard to pin a label onto something that's always moving.

Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

When you first awaken or before drifting off to sleep, quiet your mind, lift up your heart, muse, mull over, make discoveries. Consider, conceive, create, connect, concede that it all starts within.

Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

Muhammad, my friend, I'm getting very scared. Teach me how to love my brothers who don't know the law, and what about the deal on the flying trapeze?

Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can’t fully understand.

H. L. Mencken told me once that he answered all his mail, pleasant and unpleasant, with just one line, 'You may be right.' That's the way I feel now. It is in the realm of possibility, just barely, that I could be the one who's wrong.

There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections

I tend to scare myself.

All spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and nature is a window into that wonder.