Contact
Privacy
Book: Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
Quotes of Book: Reaching Out: The Three
TOP TAGS :wonderingdepartureminuteamerican-culturepsychethe-richthomas-cromwellmaidens

  1. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    Our children are our most important guests, who enter into our home, ask for careful attention, stay for a while and then leave to follow their own way. Children are strangers whom we have to get to know.
    book-quote

  2. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    The awareness that children are guests can be a liberating awareness because many parents suffer from deep guilt feelings toward their children, thinking that they are responsible for everything their sons or daughters do. When they see their child living in ways they disapprove of, the parents may castigate themselves with the questions: "What did we do wrong? What should we have done to prevent this behavior?" and they may wonder where they failed.
    book-quote

  3. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    One of the greatest tragedies of our culture is that millions of young people spend many hours, days, weeks and years listening to lectures, reading books and writing papers with a constantly increasing resistance. This has become such a widespread phenomenon that teachers on all levels, from grade school to graduate school, are complimented and praised when they can get the attention of their students and motivate them to do their work. Practically every student perceives his education as a long endless row of obligations to be fulfilled. If there is any culture that has succeeded in killing the natural spontaneous curiosity of people and dulling the human desire to know, it is our technocratic society.
    book-quote

  4. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    I remember a student presenting with great enthusiasm a summary of a book on Zen meditation while his own life experiences of restlessness, loneliness and desire for solitude and quietude remained an unknown book of knowledge to him. Just as words can become obstacles for communication, books can prevent self-knowledge.
    book-quote

  5. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    Many students have been for so many years on the receiving side and have become so deeply impregnated with the idea that there is still a lot more to learn, that they have lost confidence in themselves and can hardly imagine that they themselves have something to give, not only to the ones who are less educated but to their fellow students and teachers as well.
    book-quote

  6. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    But Karl Menninger did not accept any of these answers as the right one. His answer was "diagnosis." The first and most important task of any healer is making the right diagnosis. Without an accurate diagnosis, subsequent treatment has little effect. Or, to say it better, diagnosis is the beginning of treatment. For Karl Menninger, speaking to a group of future psychiatrists, this obviously meant that the most attention should be paid to learning the diagnostic skills of the profession. But when we take the word diagnosis in its most original and profound meaning of knowing through and through {gnosis = knowledge; dia = through and through}, we can see that the first and most important aspect of all healing is an interested effort to know the patients fully, in all their joys and pains, pleasures and sorrows, ups and downs, highs and lows, which have given shape and form to their life and have led them through the years to their present situation.
    book-quote

  7. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    The main problem of service is to be the way without being "in the way." And if there are any tools, techniques and skills to be learned they are primarily to plow the field, to cut the weeds and to clip the branches, that is, to take away the obstacles for real growth and development.
    book-quote

  8. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    Small, seemingly innocent events keep telling us how easily we eternalize ourselves and our world. It takes only a hostile word to make us feel sad and lonely. It takes only a rejecting gesture to plunge us into self-complaint. It takes only a substantial failure in our work to lead us into a self-destructive depression. Although we have learned from parents, teachers, friends and many books, sacred as well as profane, that we are worth more than what the world makes us, we keep giving an eternal value to the things we own, the people we know, the plans we have, and the successes we "collect.
    book-quote

  9. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    If prayer, understood as an intimate relationship with God, is indeed the basis of all relationships-to ourselves as well as to others.
    book-quote

  10. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    The paradox of prayer is that it asks for a serious effort while it can only be received as a gift. We cannot plan, organize or manipulate God; but without a careful discipline, we cannot receive him either.
    book-quote

  11. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    Prayer is often considered a weakness, a support system, which is used when we can no longer help ourselves. But this is only true when the God of our prayers is created in our own image and adapted to our own needs and concerns. When, however, prayer makes us reach out to God, not on our own but on his terms, then prayer pulls us away from self-preoccupations, encourages us to leave familiar ground, and challenges us to enter into a new world which cannot be contained within the narrow boundaries of our mind or heart.
    book-quote

  12. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ Reaching Out: The Three

    Maybe my own deep-rooted fear to be on my own and alone kept me going from person to person, book to book and school to school, anxiously avoiding the pain of accepting the responsibility for my own life.
    book-quote
Categories