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In any case, community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bonded to each other, each of whom is a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate.
Jean Vanier
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Jean Vanier
Age: 90 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: May 7
Naval Officer
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Genève
Hate
Bonded
Light
Mixture
Good
Mixtures
Love
Case
People
Darkness
Cases
Community
Perfect
More quotes by Jean Vanier
Every human being is a mixture of light and darkness, trust and fear, love and hate.
Jean Vanier
Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness
Jean Vanier
I believe every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. Violence should not be answered just by greater violence but by real understanding. We must ask: 'Where is the violence coming from? What is its meaning?
Jean Vanier
Each person with his or her history of being accepted or rejected, with his or her past history of inner pain and difficulties in relationships, is different. But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it. Love is what we most want, yet it is what we fear the most.
Jean Vanier
We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.
Jean Vanier
Every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. (23-24)
Jean Vanier
To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.
Jean Vanier
To love someone is not first of all to do things for them,but to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our attitude: 'You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust yourself.'
Jean Vanier
Life is a succession of crises and moments when we have to rediscover who we are and what we really want.
Jean Vanier
People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.
Jean Vanier
If we are to grow in love, the prisons of our egoism must be unlocked. This implies suffering, constant effort and repeated choices.
Jean Vanier
A tension or difficulty can signal the approach of a new grace of God. But it has to be looked at wisely and humanly.
Jean Vanier
A Christian community should do as Jesus did: propose and not impose. Its attraction must lie in the radiance cast by the love of brothers.
Jean Vanier
Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.
Jean Vanier
Stop looking for peace. Give yourselves where you are. Stop looking at yourselves, look instead at your brothers and sisters in need. Ask how you can better love your brothers and sisters. Then you will find peace.
Jean Vanier
A community is only a community when the majority of its members are making the transition from 'the community for myself' to 'myself for the community'.
Jean Vanier
The strong need the weak as much as the weak need the strong
Jean Vanier
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals.
Jean Vanier
Community is not an ideal it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we want them to be.
Jean Vanier
We don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness?
Jean Vanier
