Quotes from Joan D. Chittister

There is always new life trying to emerge in each of us. Too often we ignore the signs of resurrection and cling to part of life that have died for us.

Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.

Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that's in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.

Solitude is not a way of running away from life ... from our feelings. On the contrary. This is the time we sort them out, air them, get over them, and go on without the burden of yesterday.

Persistence may not solve everything - at least in our lifetime - but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not.

Life is the ability to start over again.

To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred.

When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life.

No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don't get it.

We are each called to go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again.

All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.

Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.

The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more.

Hospitality is simply love on the loose.

Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.

Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.

Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.

Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.

Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.

It is not our job to work miracles, but it is our task to try.

In our dreams lies our unfinished work for the world.

faith isn't faith until it's all we have to hold on to and knowledge fails us. When we pray for faith, we automatically pray for darkness. Think about it.

Freedom, in childhood, may be the right to be totally self-centered. But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years.

Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship. . . .It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.