This is a curated selection of Richard Rohr quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Richard Rohr’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Religion & Christianity Quotes
- Christ & God Quotes
- Duality & Nonduality Quotes
- Prayer & Contemplation Quotes
- Transformation & Enlightenment Quotes
25 Richard Rohr Quotes on God, Christ, Contemplation, & More
Richard Rohr Quotes on Religion & Christianity
“The first 2000 years of Christianity are going to be called ‘baby Christianity’. We’re just beginning to get the point of the revelation … In terms of geological time, the Bible has existed in the last nanosecond of time and was made highly printable only in the last 500 years … You can prove anything you want from a line in the Bible. Just pick and choose. Many of them contradict one another clearly … Jesus’ parables clearly do not allow for simply one interpretation.” — Richard Rohr
“Western Christianity was not for most people a transformational system, it was for most people a belonging system—my belonging system is better than your belonging system … Much of Christian history has been preoccupied with exclusion—who does not belong.” — Richard Rohr
“The vast majority of Western Christians still think of God as ‘out there’ because they have not had any inner experience … Once you think you’ve got God in your pocket, that you understand the great mystery, religion always becomes arrogant and idolatrous—where we love our explanations of God more than actually falling in love with God, where God refuses to ever be an object of the intellect but is only known by those who enter into love and surrender.” — Richard Rohr
“The word ‘catholic’ means universal, and the irony is that Catholicism has not been universal up to now—it’s been very tribal, very ethnic … We clearly never got it—it was much more our identification with the group.” — Richard Rohr
“There’s not a Catholic way of breathing and an Anglican way of breathing, there’s not a Protestant way of breathing, there’s not an American way of breathing, there’s not an English way of breathing, there’s not a Buddhist way of breathing, there’s not a Hindu way of breathing, there’s not a Muslim way of breathing—we’re all doing this together.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Christ & God
“A ‘Christian’ is one who sees Christ everywhere. It’s not believing in dogmas, or going to church, or following some moral commandment … There’s a universal religion, a natural religion. It doesn’t depend on the Bible.” — Richard Rohr
“You were chosen in Christ from the very beginning. The problem is solved—there’s not an apple problem to be solved later by an atonement theory … It’s a problem-solving technique to a problem that we created. It creates a father God who is pissed off at humanity and needs to be bought off to love us—which contradicts the nature of love.” — Richard Rohr
“The second coming of Christ is you. The second coming of Christ is still happening—it’s not one event, it’s the rest of history.” — Richard Rohr
“We don’t want to teach people what to see, we want to teach people how to see—and when you teach people how to see, they will recognize the Christ … You don’t need to call it ‘Christ’ to have the recognition.” — Richard Rohr
“If you don’t honor God everywhere, in all of creation and all of the species, you end up little by little honoring God nowhere.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Duality & Nonduality
“How we in organized Christianity got in trouble is we largely, overwhelmingly read the words of Jesus—who was talking nondually—with a dualistic mind … Western Christianity largely became a PhD in dualistic thinking.” — Richard Rohr
“The dualistic mind of the West understood almost the entire gospel in terms of a win-lose paradigm. It’s called a ‘zero-sum game’—someone has to lose for you to win … Can you really allow your worldview to be changed to win-win? I don’t think it’s the gospel until you can.” — Richard Rohr
“There’s a nondual way of reading reality where you don’t divide the field, where you don’t have to eliminate the negative, where you let reality get at you as it is—without judging it, analyzing it, critiquing it, explaining it, fixing it, controlling it, or even understanding it.” — Richard Rohr
“Everything belongs. It’s no longer up to you to decide who’s in and who’s out … You’re no longer in control of defining who’s in and who’s out because we’re all in … It’s one sacred ecosystem—it isn’t divided into the sacred and the secular.” — Richard Rohr
“You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego … When you’re out of the way, God can do God’s work.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Prayer & Contemplation
“Contemplation is not saying prayers. Contemplation is a different set of eyes … You don’t say prayers as much as you become a prayer—you look out at life from a place of conscious union with God.” — Richard Rohr
“The mind—the educated Western mind even more so—cannot be present in the now … You can’t think the now … How you see is what you see. Most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are. We have not given Western civilization this kind of wisdom.” — Richard Rohr
“If you can learn a contemplative way of seeing the world, you’ll still say prayers and that’s good, but you’ll more become a prayer. It’s not what you’ll see, it’s how you’ll see everything—and that changes everything.” — Richard Rohr
“There’s a prayer previous to words. There’s a prayer beyond words.” — Richard Rohr
“I’m convinced the very word ‘prayer’ originally meant a different operating system.” — Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr Quotes on Transformation & Enlightenment
“The salvation Jesus is talking about is present tense. He’s not saving someone from the hellfires later … He’s not talking about a reward-punishment system later. He’s talking about transformation now.” — Richard Rohr
“Our narrative was not a creation-based spirituality, it was a fall-redemption spirituality. Fall-redemption spirituality is what almost all of you were raised in. You create the problem, and then you say we have an answer to the problem—instead of teaching you how to be contemplative and see the sacred in everything, all the time, everywhere. That’s spiritual seeing.” — Richard Rohr
“All spiritual knowledge is not cognition. It’s recognition. You’re reknowing what you deeply already knew. What you deeply intuited, suspected, desired, hoped for—that’s the soul. The discovery of yourself and the discovery of God will eventually be parallel movements. You fall deeper into yourself. You fall deeper into God. You fall deeper into God, you have permission to fall deeper into yourself.” — Richard Rohr
“We really need a different set of eyes with which to read, or certainly understand, spiritual reality … Not to understand it literally but to understand it transformationally is the best way to understand a spiritual text.” — Richard Rohr
“The Christian meaning of enlightenment is there—it’s very parallel and consistent with awareness of who you are and how you see reality from this new ontological identity and the behaviors that proceed from that new pair of eyes.” — Richard Rohr
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