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If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives.

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
Community
Survives
Anything
Essential
Without
Essentials
Never
Quiet
Time
Realize
Side
Realizing
Retreating
Sides
Contemplative

More quotes by Henri Nouwen

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The best of community does give one a deep sense of belonging and well-being and in that sense community takes away loneliness.
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The Question is not how much are you going to accomplish? Or can you show some results? But are you in love with Jesus? In our world of brokeness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God a heart that forgives, cares, reaches out and wants to heal.
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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.
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Your heart is greater than your wounds.
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I've had a tremendous problem with depression in my life. I'd rather not talk about it, because it's over. But depression is real.
Henri Nouwen
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It is by chance that we met, by choice that we became friends.
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Real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility.
Henri Nouwen
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To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.
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I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.
Henri Nouwen
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Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.
Henri Nouwen
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Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity- an illusion! Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you but you are children of God.
Henri Nouwen
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when the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.
Henri Nouwen
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As a general remark, I would say we must move from the moral to the mystical life.
Henri Nouwen
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Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.
Henri Nouwen
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Asking people for money is giving them the opportunity to put their resources at the disposal of the Kingdom.
Henri Nouwen
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The third discipline is community. Whom do you choose as your companions? Whom do you choose to be friends with, to live with? Are they people who love you, and care for you, and nurture you?
Henri Nouwen
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Our tendency is to run from the painful realities or try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators.
Henri Nouwen
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It is God’s passionate pursuit of us that calls us to prayer.
Henri Nouwen
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The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing...that is a friend who cares.
Henri Nouwen
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The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
Henri Nouwen