Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henri Nouwen

Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.

Henri Nouwen

Christian community is the place where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us.

Henri Nouwen

The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained - through prayer, study, and careful analysis - to manifest the divine event of God's saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.

Henri Nouwen

The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? but: Are you in love with Jesus?

Henri Nouwen

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

Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.

Henri Nouwen

When we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.

Henri Nouwen

The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. God loves us, not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love.

Henri Nouwen

Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.

Henri Nouwen

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

Ministry in no way is a privilege...it is the core of the Christian life. No Christian is a Christian without being a minister.

Henri Nouwen

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.

Henri Nouwen

But what I would like to say is that the spiritual life is a life in which you gradually learn to listen to a voice that says something else, that says, "You are the beloved and on you my favour rests."... I want you to hear that voice. It is not a very loud voice because it is an intimate voice. It comes from a very deep place. It is soft and gentle. I want you to gradually hear that voice. We both have to hear that voice and to claim for ourselves that that voice speaks the truth, our truth. It tells us who we are.

Heidi Montag

God says in the bible that we should love our neighbor and he created us all as equals. I know in my heart that gays and lesbians should have the same government rights that Spencer and I will when we get married. So, yes, this blonde Christian believes in gay marriage.

Heinrich Himmler

We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity .

Heinrich Himmler

Let us assume that the Turks in whose ranks Europeans were fighting as well, even in high positions, would have conquered Vienna and Europe in 1683 instead of having been forced to withdraw. If the Mohammedans would have gained the victory at the time and Islam would have swept victoriously over Europe, then the Christian churches would have been depoliticized. (...) For the Turks were religiously tolerant, they allowed each religion to continue to exist, provided it was no longer involved in politics - otherwise it was finished.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

I don't know how many serious Christians exist here in America, but the Japanese, the younger generation is leaving the Buddhist religion mentality behind.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

To me, as a visual artist, I don't want to get into the theory of Buddhism. There are many Buddhism theories and they fight each other, like Christians as well.

Herschel Walker

As a born-again Christian, I believe God actively and directly influences me to action.

Henry Paulson

As a Christian Scientist, I don't go to doctors and get diagnoses.

Helen Mirren

I'd describe myself as a Christian who doesn't believe in God.

Helen Mirren

I can't help being Christian because I was brought up in Britain, and the morality of Christianity is part of the fabric of this country.

Heinrich Heine

What Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Hilaire Belloc

Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, it distribution and exchange were regulated with a view to securing the Christian life of Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in others words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly, in the close connection between wealth and public function.

Hilaire Belloc

Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.

Henry Ward Beecher

If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.

Henry Ward Beecher

We never know how much one loves till we know how much he is willing to endure and suffer for us; and it is the suffering element that measures love. The characters that are great must, of necessity, be characters that shall be willing, patient and strong to endure for others. To hold our nature in the willing service of another is the divine idea of manhood, of the human character.

Henry Ward Beecher

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.

Henry Ward Beecher

The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others.

Henry Ward Beecher

Christians should be like a flower store: the odor of sanctity should betray them wherever they are.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

When you with velvets mantled o'er, Defy December's tempests frore, Oh! spare one garment from your store, To clothe the poor at Christmas.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.