Skip to content

Religion Quotes by Richard Rohr

96 Religion quotes by Richard Rohr

All Religion quotes Richard Rohr’s page

Richard Rohr says that true spirituality works with pain and turns it into growth. He criticizes organized religion for missing deeper work and urges solitude and silence for teachers. He also highlights empathy and connection as a common thread across faiths.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

It seems we are suffering from a very narrow and self serving reading of the Gospel right now.

Image

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.

Image

Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything.

Image

“You can unlock spiritual things only from within.”

Image

Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

Image

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

Image

It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.

Image

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

Image

The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes…

Image

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

Image

The real spiritual journey is work. You can make a naïve assertion that you trust in Jesus, but until it is tested…

Image

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

Image

“And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations…

Image

The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

Image

“Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of…

Image

Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the…

Image

“Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery…

Image

We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for…

Image

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses…

Image

The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to…

Image

Nature religions, for example, speak of summer, fall, winter, and spring. They see the downward path as the necessary prelude to any…

Image

As to his gospel, Jesus Christ came into the world as the image of the invisible God to communicate to us that…

Image

To believe in Jesus, is to believe that the historic person who lived on this earth more than 2000 years ago was…

Image

If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me,…

Image

“There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot…

Image

Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made…

Image

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security.…

Image

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out…

Image

“I’m sure that this is equally true of men in the business world or any world. We all need someone with inner…

Image

“When you say you love God, you are saying you love everything. Immature religion becomes an excuse for not loving a whole…

Image

“In this book I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most…

Image

If you work with such people almost on the level of spiritual direction, you see that they are people who prefer a…

Image

“The Sunday service alone seldom leads people on deeper or even real journeys; we must begin to be honest about this. All…

Image

“To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we have to have three spaces opened up within us - and all at the same…

Image

“Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until…

Image

“Thomas Merton said it was actually dangerous to put the Scriptures in the hands of people whose inner self is not yet…

Image

“A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.”

Image

The spiritual world is hidden and perfectly revealed in the physical world.

Image

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

Image

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

Image

Other authors on Religion

More by Richard Rohr

“We have become human doings more than human beings, and the verb “rest,” as Jesus uses it, is largely foreign to us.”

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

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship,…

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain…

“In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process.…

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

“I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and…

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

“I believe contemplation shows us that nothing inside us is as bad as our hatred and denial of the bad. Hating and denying it…

We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my…

If you do not transform your wounds you will transmit them.

The real spiritual journey is work. You can make a naïve assertion that you trust in Jesus, but until it is tested a good,…

“The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.”