Quotes from Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard

The Liturgy may be considered a school for acquiring four fruits: the presence of God, sorrow for sin, joy, and prayer.

Let the men eaten up with activity," he says, "and who imagine they are able to shake the world with their preaching and other outward works, stop and reflect a moment. It will not be difficult for them to understand that they would be much more useful to the Church and more pleasing to the Lord, not to mention the good example they would give to those around them, if they devoted more time to prayer and to the exercises of the interior life.

O Lord Jesus, with Thy most kind and merciful, and yet most powerful, hand, deign to form my heart so that it may be like Thine.

Goodness seeks nothing except to give itself and to communicate the riches which it enjoys.

When the smith plunges the iron into the fire, he is not just trying to make it hot and glowing; he wants to make it malleable. So too, the only reason why mental prayer is to give light to my mind and warmth to my heart is to make my soul pliant so that it can be hammered into a new shape, so that the faults and form of the old man may be hammered out, and the form and virtues of Jesus Christ imparted to it.

so long as we have not made the fathers of families not only into Christians but also into apostles, the influence of Christian mothers, great as it is, will be obstructed or short-lived and we will never set the social kingdom of Christ on a firm basis.

Only the interior life can sustain us in the hidden, backbreaking labor of planting the seed that seems to go so long without fruit.

Action, to prove fertile, stands in need of contemplation;

Father St. Jure, S.J., commenting on Canticles 8:6 — "Place me as a seal upon thy heart and as a seal upon thy arm" — says that "the heart signifies the interior, contemplative life, and the arm, the exterior, active life, and that Holy Scripture mentions the heart and the arm together in order to show that both modes of life can be found perfect together in one person. The heart is mentioned first, because it is far more noble and necessary than the arm.