Henri Nouwen Quotes About Loneliness

Quotes about: Loneliness

• 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. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

  Henri Nouwen

  Spiritual, Loneliness, Garden

• Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours.

  Henri Nouwen

  Prayer, Pain, War

  Henri J. M. Nouwen (2016). “The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles by Henri Nouwen”, p.36, HarperCollins

• In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.

  Henri Nouwen

  Happiness, Lonely, Memories

• The best of community does give one a deep sense of belonging and well-being; and in that sense community takes away loneliness.

  Henri Nouwen

  Loneliness, Giving, Community

  Source: archives.wineskins.org

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

  Henri Nouwen

  Life, Spiritual, Loneliness

  Henri Nouwen (2013). “Reaching Out”, p.34, Image

• If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning...and ask yourself whether this situation is truly God given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain. To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you. The more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you.

  Henri Nouwen

  Spiritual, Pain, Loneliness

• In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of, you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That's a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community.

  Henri Nouwen

  Dream, Loneliness, Dark

  Source: archives.wineskins.org

• It is precisely when you are loved a lot that you might realize a second loneliness which is not to be solved but lived. This second loneliness is an existential loneliness that belongs to the basis of our being. It's where we are unfulfilled because only God can fill us.

  Henri Nouwen

  Loneliness, Might, Realizing

  Source: archives.wineskins.org

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