What the Mystics Know Quotes

“Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“It is the things that you cannot do anything about and the things that you cannot do anything with that do something with you.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“There are three primary things that we have to let go of. First is the compulsion to be successful. Second is the compulsion to be right—even, and especially, to be theologically right…. Finally there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control. I”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“My starting point is that we’re already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“The self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives at the Gospel. The self that begins is the self that we think ourselves to be, the superior self we want to be. This is the self that dies along the way— until ‘no one’ is left. This is the true self that all Great Religion talks about, the self bigger than death yet born of death, a different self than the private I, a self transformed by God and transformed in God.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living.
We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“I believe that there are two necessary paths enabling us to move toward wisdom: a radical journey inward and a radical journey outward. For”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“As Dorothy Day once wisely said, “What the Gospel forever takes away from Christians is the right to judge between the worthy and the unworthy poor.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“We’re sleepwalkers. All religious teachers have recognized that we human beings do not naturally see; we have to be taught how to see. That’s what religion is for. That’s why the Buddha and Jesus say with one voice, “Be awake.” Jesus talks about “staying watchful” (Matt. 25:13; Luke 12:37; Mark 13:33–37), and “Buddha” means “I am awake” in Sanskrit. Jesus says further, “If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light” (Luke 11:34). Thus,”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“WHEN RELIGION CANNOT KNEEL Aristotle said democracy would only work in a culture already committed to virtue. There is no communal myth left that teaches us the essentially tragic nature of human life; there is no vision that proclaims the primacy of the common good; there is no transcendent image that makes human virtue a divine reflection. There is No One to reflect and No One to love and serve. I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel. I do not want to live in a world where there is No One to adore. It is a lonely and labored world if I am its only center. My life is too short to discover wisdom on my own, to identify and properly name my own self-importance, to learn how to love if I have to start at zero.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“Would there be communion at all if there were no need on this earth, no suffering on this earth? If there were no sin? No imperfection? I think there would be no such communion as we now have. We would each live in our isolated worlds. I would not need you. I would not be drawn to you. I would be self-sufficient. I would be caught up smugly and happily in my own perfection. I would simply draw my life totally from within and would never need to look at the beauty or pain on others’ faces. This is the Gnostic temptation, condemned in some form in every century. There are two things that draw us outside of ourselves: pain on other people’s faces, and the unbelievable beauty that is other human beings at their best. Or in other words: cross and resurrection.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“What they lack is a spiritual center, a Reference Point outside of the private “I.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“Liberalism creates suspicious people more than loving people.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“Trusting in God is not a passive dependency, a handing over of responsibility: “Okay, God, you can do it.” Faith in God is primarily an active virtue. Faith does not necessarily mean an expectation that God will intervene. Faith is an end in itself. Faith is an active empowering of the other to be everything he or she can be for you. It calls forth in the other and in oneself what it sees. Some would simply call it “the power of positive thinking” or self-fulfilling trust.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“I believe, necessary for both joy and truth in this world.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“like”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“religion is for. That’s why the Buddha and Jesus say with one voice, “Be awake.” Jesus talks about “staying watchful” (Matt. 25:13; Luke 12:37; Mark 13:33–37), and “Buddha” means “I am awake” in Sanskrit. Jesus says further, “If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light” (Luke 11:34). Thus, we have to learn to see what is there. Such a simple directive is hard for us to understand. We want to attain some concrete information or achieve an improved”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“Thus,”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“JULIAN OF NORWICH AND
THE FIRST”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“From eighteen to fifty-five was the unfolding. Then, when it happened at fifty-five, they knew what they were born for. When that moment comes, it is great and it is all synchronicity. We know then that grace is at work and we are not manufacturing our own lives.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“Even with all the best intentions in the world, given our different temperaments, backgrounds, and the way we process our data and information, we are going to step on one another’s toes. Two people with absolutely good will can deeply hurt one another. Good people hurt one another because we all come at reality in different ways. That’s why, for Jesus, the only way to achieve union is through forgiveness, not through making sin impossible.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“Trusting in God is not a passive dependency, a handing over of responsibility: “Okay, God, you can do it.” Faith in God is primarily an active virtue. Faith does not necessarily mean an expectation that God will intervene. Faith is an end in itself. Faith is an active empowering of the other to be everything he or she can be for you.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“People who have never been in this downtrodden, impoverished situation can be very unsympathetic because they don’t realize what’s happening inside. From their secure position—usually in the middle or upper classes—it’s easy to call the poor lazy or unmotivated. Such people do not understand the psychological dimension of poverty. The poor have little chance of changing their state without some help from outside.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“do not find our own Center; it finds us. The body is in the soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“We have to accept that human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We’re sleepwalkers.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self

“you never think yourself into a new way of living. You invariably live yourself into a new way of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self