Richard Rohr Self Quotations

Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.

The more one gives one's self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one's self.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

The school of relationships is where you learn self-knowledge. I just don't know how you could learn it sitting alone in the desert on a rock by yourself. You have to see where you fail at it. And that confrontation with your own ability - "I was again not able to love" - those are the teachable moments.

Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love.

Modern culture is in so much trouble, where people don't have a deep inner life, or any deep experience of their true self in God, who they were before anyone said anything about them, before they received their first medal or ego identification. That`s why suffering is so important, because suffering is when those little rewards are taken away from you.

The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.

We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.

Our culture is almost entirely prepared to not just help you create your false self, but to get very identified with it and attached to it. So, without some form of God experience, which teaches you who you are apart from that - we would say in the religious world, who you are "in" God, in the mind and heart of God - there's almost no way to get out of it.

We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.

Your false self is always that which is passing away. Your true self doesn't go up or down, it's constant - it's a rock. Once you learn how to live there, what others say about you, your failures or successes - these don't send you on a roller coaster ride down or up. It's really the only way to peace. There's no other way to be peaceful except in the true self.

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

Either you allow Holy Scriptures to change you, or you will normally try to use it to change--and clobber--other people. It is the height of idolatry to use the supposed Word of God so that my small self can be in control and be right. But I am afraid this has been more the norm than the exception in the use of the Bible.