Quotes About Spirituality

We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.

The climate of this prayer is, then, one of awareness, gratitude and a totally obedient love which seeks nothing but to please God.

What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction?

As soon as you are really alone you are with God.

A saint is not someone who is good but someone who experiences the goodness of God.

Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself.

This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own.

Monastic prayer begins not so much with "considerations" as with a "return to the heart," finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being

It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.

And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime, And as each blow was paid with Blood, You paid me also each great sin with greater graces. For even as I killed You, You made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company, Stealing my sins into Your dying life, Robbing me even of my death.

But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact pleases You.

The proud man loves his own illusion and self-sufficiency. The spiritually poor man loves his very insufficiency.

Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei.

The "spiritual life" is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete man who is in God and with God and from God and for God. One man in whom God is all in all. One man in whom God carries out His own will without obstacle.

Christianity is not stoicism. The Cross does not sanctify us by destroying human feeling. Detachment is not insensibility. Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace.

You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, Solitude, solitude. And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, Leave all things and follow me, and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?

Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this.

For although he is right with us and in and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find Him.

The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.

If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass beyond the inner I, we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the I AM of the Almighty.

We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by "how we feel." A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened and apparently a big success.

Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God

Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.

God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.