Henri Nouwen

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.

How can one be well…when one suffers morally?

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.