Jean Vanier Quotes

At the heart of the celebration, there are the poor. If [they] are excluded, it is not longer a celebration. [...] A celebration must always be a festival of the poor.

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.

A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!

When we love and respect people, revealing to them their value, they can begin to come out from behind the walls that protect them.

To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance.

Machines help us do things more quickly and efficiently, but they can also destroy some community activities. Machines can also throw the weakest people out of work and this would be sad, because their small contribution to the housework or cooking is their way of giving something to the community. People who are capable of doing things very quickly with the help of machines become tremendously busy, always active, in charge of everyone - a bit like machines themselves.

A tension or difficulty can signal the approach of a new grace of God. But it has to be looked at wisely and humanly.

Jesus is the starving, the parched, the prisoner, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the dying. Jesus is the oppressed, the poor. To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus.

People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.

A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift.

Community is not an ideal; it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we want them to be.

...Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, 'Beware of the Dog.

I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.

We work for peace every time we exercise authority with wisdom and authentic love.

True peace can rarely be imposed from the outside; it must be born within and between communities through meetings and dialogue and then carried outward.

This evolution towards a real responsibility for others is sometimes blocked by fear. It is easier to stay on the level of a pleasant way of life in which we keep our freedom and our distance. But that means that we stop growing and shut ourselves up in our own small concerns and pleasures.

Avoid the poison in your life that brings you turmoil.

I do not believe we can truly enter into our own inner pain and wounds and open our hearts to others unless we have had an experience of God, unless we have been touched by God. We must be touched by the Father in order to experience, as the prodigal son did, that no matter how wounded we may be, we are loved. And not only are we loved, but we too are called to heal and to liberate. This healing power in us will not come from our capacities and our riches, but in and through our poverty. We are called to discover that God can bring peace, compassion and love through our wounds.

When we start helping the weak and the poor to rise everyone will begin to change. Those who have power and riches will start to become more humble, and those who are rising up will leave behind their need to be victims, their need to be angry or depressed....This is the spirituality of life, that helps people to rise up and take their place. It is not a spirituality of death. Jesus wants those who have been crushed to rise up and those who have power to discover that there is another road, a road of sharing and compassion.

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.

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.

So we need places, laboratories, the creation of places which could be each one of our homes, where we invite people who are different, and we listen to each other, people of different class groups.

Life is a succession of crises and moments when we have to rediscover who we are and what we really want.

We cannot grow spiritually if we ignore our humanness, just as we cannot become fully human if we ignore our spirituality.

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.

When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest.

The belly laugh is the best way to evacuate anguish.

A community is only a community when the majority of its members are making the transition from 'the community for myself' to 'myself for the community'.

[Happiness] comes when we choose to be who we are, to be ourselves, at this present moment in our lives.

He who is or has been deeply hurt has a RIGHT to be sure he is LOVED.

Every human activity can be put at the service of the divine and of love. We should all exercise our gift to build community.

[...] We have to realize that this wound [of loneliness] is inherent in the human condition and that what we have to do is walk with it instead of fleeing from it. We cannot accept it until we discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit in a mysterious way is living at the centre of the wound.

I have discovered the value of psychology and psychiatry, that their teachings can undo knots in us and permit life to flow again and aid us in becoming more truly human.

Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.

Power always has a direction. It is always downward, towards the weak but power is often confused with what is right

To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus.

Many people confuse authority and the power of efficiency, as if the first role of people with responsibility is to take decisions, command effectively and so exercise power. But their role first of all is to be a person to whom others can turn for help and advice, to provide security, to affirm, to support, to encourage and to guide.

Our danger is to think that happiness will come from outside of us, from the things we possess or the power of our group, and not from within us, from the inner sanctuary of our being.

If we love (the poor) people, we want to identify with them and share with them.

Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.

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.

Wisdom is something that comes, little by little, through a lot of listening.

To invite others to live with us is a sign that we aren't afraid, that we have a treasure of truth and of peace to share.

Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.

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.

Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness

Love is an act of endless forgiveness.

All of us have a secret desire to be seen as saints, heroes, martyrs. We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves.