Quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr

Francis's starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness

The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.

Contemplation, sadly, helps you see your woundedness! That's why most people do not stay long with contemplative prayer, because it's not very glorious. It's a continual humiliation, realizing, "Oh my God, I did it again. I still don't know how to love!

This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of memory, not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don't have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You're trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message. As a result, we spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying to get other people to do the same. Too often this obsession became a pious substitute for actually following what he taught—and he did ask us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him.

We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves—by themselves—and in themselves.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).