Henri Nouwen

“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly.”

“Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.”

“To forgive is to make a conscious choice to release the person who has wounded us from the sentence of our judgment.”

“Pay attention to the people God puts in your path if you want to discern what God is up to in your life.”

“Joy is the secret of grinning inwardly.”

“Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.”

“What is hardest to accept is that we are not the masters of our own lives.”

“Solitude is the furnace of transformation.”

“Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends.”

“The main question is not, 'How can we hide our wounds?'... but 'How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?'”

“Every time you speak of gratitude, you are planting seeds of happiness.”

“The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”

“Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.”

“Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the 'Beloved.'”

“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish.”

“The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us.”

“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.”

“Worrying is a way of holding on to the illusion that we have control.”

“Dear God, I am so afraid to open my clenched fists! Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?”

“Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but faith is intelligent trust, trusting that something will be fulfilled, not according to our own agenda, but according to God's.”