Top 259 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Rohr

Words and ideas work in the short run to get you through school and to impress educators and employers. But they do not work in the long run or in the deep run. We soon find ourselves separate and without wonder.

When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again.

Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.

The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know.

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.

Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

Having a school really is the fulfillment of a longtime dream of mine.

People inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group. They are threatened by anyone who has found their citizenship in places they cannot control.

This earth indeed is the very Body of God, and it is from this body that we are born, live, suffer, and resurrect to eternal life. Either all is God's Great Project, or we may rightly wonder whether anything is God's Great Project. One wonders if we humans will be the last to accept this.

The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.

Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.

Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point.

If you depend on being emotionally inspired or newly motivated, you will need a new fix almost every day.

One is struck in the study of saints, angels and gods by a pattern that seems quaint and harmless. Yet, it is so common that I know there must be a deeper meaning. There always seem to be guardians and spirits of doors, bridges, exits and entranceways.

Most Christian 'believers' tend to echo the cultural prejudices and worldviews of the dominant group in their country, with only a minority revealing any real transformation of attitudes or consciousness. It has been true of slavery and racism, classism and consumerism and issues of immigration and health care for the poor.

I see little difference in the attitudes of those who consider themselves Christian and those who are openly secular and agnostic. Most Christian citizenship appears to be clearly right here - on this little bit of very unreal estate.

Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.

If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don't think so.

Men and women are most alike at their most mature and soulful levels. Men and women are most different only at their most immature and merely physical levels.

It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy.

One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action.

Transformed people transform people.

Most women prefer circles of sharing to pyramids and hierarchies. They prefer conversation to construction. They will usually choose nurturance and empathy over competition and climbing. They will normally choose connection over simple performance games.

I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

Ancients knew that you need guidance, patronage and protection as you move from one place or state to another, whenever you cross a bridge. You had better know what you are doing when you leave one group or place to join another.

One would think that people who insist on being monotheistic would be the first in line to walk across the artificial boundaries created by nation states, class systems, cultures and even religions. But often they are the last!

God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history.

If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.

It's not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don't run and report me to the bishop, all right? It's not correct to say that - Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That's different.

In my opinion, most organized religion does neither agentic service nor relational nurturance very well.

Most of the Catholics Christians I've met would for all practical purposes believe Jesus is God only, and we are human only. We missed the big point. The point is the integration, both in Jesus and ourselves.

Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens.

You have to find some way to not become a cynical or negative person, a person who keeps walking around and opening your eyes in the outside world but inside you close down, a person who stops expecting tomorrow to be better than today.

Yes, the natural world is the first and primary Bible. We have not honored it, so how could we, or would we, know how to honor and properly use the second Bible, when it was written.

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.

We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries.

We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for private and pious devotions that usually have little power to actually change us or call our ego assumptions into question.

I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.

This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

Heartbreaks, disappointments and even our own weaknesses can serve as stepping-stones to the second half of life transformation. Failings are the foundation for growth. Those who have fallen, failed or 'gone down' are the only ones who understand 'up.'

Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.

Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.

Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.

If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.

People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.

Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!

Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established "religion" (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one's "personal Lord and Savior" . . . The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.

Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, and praising God until we ourselves are an act of praise.

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody . . .

God comes to us disguised as our life.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.

There are three things we have to let go of. The first is the compulsion to be successful. Second, is the compulsion to be right-especially theologically right. (That's merely an ego trip, and because of this "need" churches split in half, with both parties prisoners of their own egos.) Finally, there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.