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I was forced to enter the basement of my soul and look directly at what was hidden there, and to choose, in the face of it all, not death but life.
Henri Nouwen
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Henri Nouwen
Age: 64 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 24
Died: 1996
Died: September 21
Catholic Priest
Presbyter
Priest
Psychologist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen
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Life
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Basement
Death
Basements
Soul
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More quotes by Henri Nouwen
The pain that comes from deep love makes your love more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root.
Henri Nouwen
So I am praying while not knowing how to pray. I am resting while feeling restless, at peace while tempted, safe while still anxious, surrounded by a cloud of light while still in darkness, in love while still doubting.
Henri Nouwen
The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark.
Henri Nouwen
The spiritual life is a life beyond moods. It is a life in which we choose joy and do not allow ourselves to become victims of passing feelings of happiness or depression.
Henri Nouwen
Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.
Henri Nouwen
As a general remark, I would say we must move from the moral to the mystical life.
Henri Nouwen
If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.
Henri Nouwen
Although we tend to think about saints as holy and pious, and picture them with halos above their heads and ecstatic gazes, true saints are much more accessible. They are men and women like us, who live ordinary lives and struggle with ordinary problems. What makes them saints is their clear and unwavering focus on God and God's people.
Henri Nouwen
To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, welcome, to accept.
Henri Nouwen
The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.
Henri Nouwen
The Church will always be renewed when our attention shifts from ourselves to those who need our care. The blessing of Jesus always comes to us through the poor. The most remarkable experience of those who work with the poor is that, in the end, the poor give more than they receive. They give food to us.
Henri Nouwen
The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.
Henri Nouwen
The dance of life finds its beginnings in grief......Here a completely new way of living is revealed. It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain.
Henri Nouwen
To be a minister means above all to become powerless, or in more precise terms, to speak with our powerlessness to the condition of powerlessness which is so keenly felt but so seldom expressed by the people of our age.
Henri Nouwen
We need to remind each other that the cup of sorrow is also the cup of joy, that precisely what causes us sadness can become the fertile ground for gladness.
Henri Nouwen
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it
Henri Nouwen
Prayer is the breath of your life which gives you the freedom to go and stay where you wish and to find the many signs which point out the way to a new land.
Henri Nouwen
If you believe you are the beloved of God, you need to spend time listening to his voice - period! You can't say, Yes God calls me the beloved, but I have to go out to do something now.
Henri Nouwen
To live in the present, we must deeply believe that what is most important is in the here and now.
Henri Nouwen
Waiting time is not wasting time. Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.
Henri Nouwen