Henri Nouwen

"We are sustained by the communion of saints who have gone before us."

"Authentic spirituality is marked by increasing compassion for all beings."

"We must learn to receive the gift of our own mortality."

"The spiritual life is the life of becoming more fully human."

"We are called to proclaim good news through our presence and actions."

"Spiritual growth requires that we embrace both darkness and light."

"We must learn to trust that God's love is stronger than our failures."

"The greatest spiritual gift is the ability to be present with another's suffering."

"We are healed through the acknowledgment of our woundedness and brokenness."

"The spiritual life is characterized by increasing freedom and deepening love."

"The spiritual life is not a life before, above, or beyond the physical life. Rather, it is the deepest dimension of all life."

"To care for another person is to help them grow and actualize themselves."

"Loneliness is the pain of being alone, while solitude is the glory of being alone."

"The more you own, the more it owns you."

"Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place."

"The friend who can be silent with you in a moment of despair is worth more than the friend who fills the silence with words."

"Prayer is the most radical discipline available to us because prayer asks us to be present to God in all circumstances."

"Friendship is one of the highest human values, yet we often treat it with casual indifference."

"Our life is not our own from birth to death. Rather, from conception to birth to death and beyond, we are received as gifts."

"Healing does not mean curing. It means a full encounter with our brokenness."

"To be alive is to be broken; and to be broken is to stand in need of grace."

"The more you think you own, the more you are owned by your possessions."

"In our obsession with conquering the world, we have lost touch with wonder, the wonder in which the life of faith begins."

"A spiritual life is impossible without prayer, and prayer is only truly prayer when it is a free act of surrender."

"The real enemies of our life are not external, but internal: our own compulsions, our own obsessions, our own demands."

"Intimacy is not something you can produce or engineer; it emerges when you honor the otherness of the other."

"Our individualistic culture has made us believe that solitude is a luxury for the spiritually advanced."

"Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives."

"The deepest desire of the human heart is to be at home with God, with ourselves, and with others."

"When we have nothing left to hold onto, we discover that God is all we really need."