Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Remember, Monsieur that roses are not gathered except in the midst of thorns and that heroic acts of virtue are accomplished only in weakness.
Our waiting is not nothing. It is something -- a very big something -- because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.
The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.
But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?
We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.
Reason is one thing and faith is another and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.
The Holy Eucharist is the perfect expression of the love of Jesus Christ for man since It is the quintessence of all the mysteries of His Life.
I hurry to express to you and your fellow citizens my profound sorrow and my closeness in prayer for the nation at this dark and tragic moment.
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.
Rarely is any good done without difficulty; the devil is too subtle and the world too corrupt not to attempt to nip such a good work in the bud
To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.
The highest religious and spiritual ideals of any faith would invite us to a compassion for all lives destroyed by the violence that plagues us.
There is no such thing as a bad cop, only disturbing and dominant cop thinking that will invariably lead to excessive force and tragic outcomes.
Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.
With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
Our communal worship at Mass must go together with our personal worship of Jesus in Eucharistic adoration in order that our love may be complete
Christians will want to be in the vanguard in favoring ways of life that decisively break with the exhausting and joyless frenzy of consumerism.
Christ assigns as a duty to every man the dignity of every woman: and simultaneously... He also assigns to every woman the dignity of every man.
I find Jesus my confidant and companion, brother and savior; our relationship is intimate, vulnerable, demanding yet comfortable and reassuring.
Jesus is an example. We have other examples, including many of our ancestors as role models who understood the inner meaning of our orientation.
What can the Church do? If she stands by her moral teaching, then she will be seen as standing in judgement over a vast percentage of Europeans.
With whose imperfections will you bear, and what insult are you capable of enduring, if a thoughtless word from your own Superior is unbearable?
Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.
Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.
The most important thing I've come to believe in is that people with mental handicaps have a unique mission to bring God's blessing to the World.
Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it.
Take heart young people! Christ is calling you and the world awaits you! Remember the Kingdom of God needs your generous and complete dedication.
...all that is carried along by the stream's silvery cascade, rhythmically falling from the mountain, carried by its own current-- carried where?
Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.
Gang members aren't frightened into acceptable behavior by increased penalties, enhanced punishments, and the promise of new detention facilities.
One of the main tasks of theology is to find words that do not divide but unite, that do not create conflict but unity, that do not hurt but heal.
People who pray stand receptive before the world. They no longer grab but caress, they no longer bite but kiss, they no longer examine but admire.
When we have sold our identity to the judges of this world, we are bound to become restless, because of a growing need for affirmation and praise.
I am working on three things: on being a prayerful person; on staying close to the handicapped; and on my writing. These are my constant concerns.
Action must be taken at once; there is no time to be lost; we shall yet see the oppressors' yoke broken and the fragments scattered on the ground.
The biggest sin against the poor and the hungry is perhaps indifference, making believe we do not see, passing by on the other side of the street.
Note the three most important Cabinet positions. Rice said that it was better to find the weapons of mass destruction than to see a mushroom cloud.
I don't cling to earthly life because I believe in eternal life. That's the big distinction between my point of view and a purely secular position.
I was forced to enter the basement of my soul and look directly at what was hidden there, and to choose, in the face of it all, not death but life.
There is a knowledge which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labor.
Holidays and vacations can help to balance activity with contemplation, haste with more natural rhythms, noise with the heralding silence of peace.
Reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way.
Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.
Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil smelling-place.
God is not related to creatures as though belonging to a different "genus," but as transcending every "genus," and as the principle of all "genera.
Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other, God or the gods, and with the human other, the stranger.
We must hold as an irrefutable maxim that the difficulties we have with our neighbor arise more from our immortified moods than from anything else.
Maybe miracles are given not to prove anything, but simply to remind us that the physical world is not so solid and real and dependable as we think.
If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.
Christian community is the place where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us.