Quotes from Henri Nouwen
I loved to teach, I loved my students, but I wanted to find a community. I prayed: "Lord, show me where you want me to go. I will go wanted wherever you call me - but please be clear."
- Henri Nouwen
The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.
- Henri Nouwen
Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)
- Henri Nouwen
Active waiting means present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.
- Henri Nouwen
Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing-sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death--can take that love away.
- Henri Nouwen
Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.
- Henri Nouwen
The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don't see the results.
- Henri Nouwen
Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.
- Henri Nouwen
The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
- Henri Nouwen
For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved.
- Henri Nouwen
The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.
- Henri Nouwen
My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.
- Henri Nouwen