Quotes About Spirituality

Difference between a vocation and a category. Those who fulfill their vocation to sanctity--or who are fulfilling it--are by that very fact unaccountable. They do not fit into categories. If you use a category in speaking of them you have to qualify statement at once, as if they also belonged to some completely different category. In actual fact, they are in no category, they are particular themselves...

our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see.

The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love.

It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is and evermore shall be.

We live as spiritual men when we live as men seeking God.

ONE of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.

Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.

It was because the saints were absorbed in God that they were truly capable of seeing and appreciating created things and it was because they loved Him alone that they alone loved everybody. S

To separate meditation from prayer, reading and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contemplative character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end.

Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!

God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself.

By "prayer of the heart" we seek God himself present in the depths of our being and meet him there by invoking the name of Jesus in faith, wonder and love.

EVERY one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I've got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest.

The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.

We do not see God in contemplation - we know Him by love: for his pure love and when we taste the experience of loving God for his own sake alone, we know by experience who and what he is.

God does not give his joy to us for ourselves alone, and if we could possess him for ourselves alone we would not possess him at all. Any joy that does not overflow from our souls and help other men to rejoice in God does not come to us form God. (But do not think that you have to see how it overflows into the souls of others. In the economy of his grace, you may be sharing his gifts with someone you will never know until you get to heaven.)

Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself. He is not at peace with himself because he is not at peace with God.

as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him.

Even though my natural acts are good they have a tendency, when they are only natural, to concentrate my faculties on the man that I am not, the one I cannot be, the false self in me, the character that God does not know. This is because I am born in selfishness. I am born self-centered. And this is original sin.

For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it.

THE MONASTERY IS A SCHOOL—A SCHOOL IN WHICH WE learn from God how to be happy.

We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be.

And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mercy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face.