Jean Vanier Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Jean Vanier quote about:
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“Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Each person is sacred, no matter what his or her culture, religion, handicap, or fragility. Each person is created in God’s image; each one has a heart, a capacity to love and to be loved.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness”
-- Jean Vanier -
“We don't know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don't know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn't exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven't welcomed our own weakness?”
-- Jean Vanier -
“In the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Every child, every person needs to know that they are a source of joy; every child, every person, needs to be celebrated. Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity can our negative, broken self-images be transformed.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Each human being, however small or weak, has something to bring to humanity. As we start to really get to know others, as we begin to listen to each other's stories, things begin to change. We begin the movement from exclusion to inclusion, from fear to trust, from closedness to openness, from judgment and prejudice to forgiveness and understanding. It is a movement of the heart.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“All of us have a secret desire to be seen as saints, heroes, martyrs. We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“It is only when we stand up, with all our failings and sufferings, and try to support others rather than withdraw into ourselves, that we can fully live the life of community.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us”
-- Jean Vanier -
“When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Wisdom is something that comes, little by little, through a lot of listening.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“A society which discards those who are weak and non-productive risks exaggerating the development of reason, organisation, aggression and the desire to dominate. It becomes a society without a heart, without kindness - a rational and sad society, lacking celebration, divided within itself and given to competition, rivalry and, finally, violence.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“The poor are always prophetic. As true prophets always point out, they reveal God's design. That is why we should take time to listen to them. And that means staying near them, because they speak quietly and infrequently; they are afraid to speak out, they lack confidence in themselves because they have been broken and oppressed. But if we listen to them, they will bring us back to the essential.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Every human being is a mixture of light and darkness, trust and fear, love and hate.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“We all know well that we can do things for others and in the process crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of doing things by themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“A Christian community should do as Jesus did: propose and not impose. Its attraction must lie in the radiance cast by the love of brothers.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“I believe every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. Violence should not be answered just by greater violence but by real understanding. We must ask: 'Where is the violence coming from? What is its meaning?”
-- Jean Vanier -
“We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy--in fact, the opposite.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“The person in misery does not need a look that judges and criticizes but a comforting presence that brings peace and hope and life and says: 'you are a human person: important, mysterious, infinitely precious, what you have to say is important because it flows from a humn person; in you there are those seeds of the infinite, those germs of love... of beauty which must rise from the earth of your misery so humanity be fulfilled. If you do not rise then something will be missing... Rise again because we all need you... be loved beloved.'”
-- Jean Vanier -
“The response to war is to live like brothers and sisters. The response to injustice is to share. The response to despair is a limitless trust and hope. The response to prejudice and hatred is forgiveness. To work for community is to work for humanity. To work for peace is to work for a true political solution; it is to work for the Kingdom of God. It is to work to enable every one to live and taste the secret joys of the human person united to the eternal.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“Each person with his or her history of being accepted or rejected, with his or her past history of inner pain and difficulties in relationships, is different. But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it. Love is what we most want, yet it is what we fear the most.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“When we begin to believe that there is greater joy in working with and for others, rather than just for ourselves, then our society will truly become a place of celebration.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“If we are to grow in love, the prisons of our egoism must be unlocked. This implies suffering, constant effort and repeated choices.”
-- Jean Vanier -
“I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.”
-- Jean Vanier
