Top 146 Quotes & Sayings by Joan D. Chittister - Page 2

"Ideals are like stars," Carl Schurz wrote. "You will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like seafarers on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny." Ideals do not determine what we do to make a living in life; They govern what we become as we do it.

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.

The kind of "blind obedience" once theologized as the ultimate step to holiness, is itself blind. It blinds a person to the insights and foresight and moral perspective of anyone other than an authority figure.

To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not "coming." Heaven is here.

When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have.

Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.

prayer can be an easy substitute for real spirituality. It would be impossible to have spirituality without prayer, of course, but it is certainly possible to pray without having a spirituality at all. How do you know? 'Am I becoming kinder?' is a good place to start.

The question is not, do we go to church; the question is, have we been converted. The crux of Christianity is not whether or not we give donations to popular charities but whether or not we are really committed to the poor.

What is the spirituality we need for the 21st century? We face a choice: to retire from this fray into some marshmallow paradise where we can massage away the heat of the day, the questions of the time, the injustice of the age, and live like pious moles in the heart of a twisted world. Or, we can gather our strength - our spiritual strength - for the struggle it will take to wake up from this pious sleep.

Life is the ability to start over again.

If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it.

Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. It is the strange knock at the door, the sudden sight of an unceremoniously blooming flower, an afternoon in the yard, a day of riding the midtown bus. Just to see. Just to notice. Just to be there.

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.

Memory is not about what went on in the past, it is about what is going on inside us right this moment. ? It is made up of the stuff of life in the process of becoming the grist of the soul.

Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.

Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That's a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.

To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.

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

Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. "Success is dangerous," the painter Pablo Picasso said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying - which it should be. Tye danger of old age is that we may start acting old.

Happiness does not come quickly. It is not conferred by any single event, however exciting or comforting or satisfying the event may be. It cannot be purchased, whatever the allure of the next, the newest, the brightest, the best. Happiness, like Carl Sandburg's fog, "comes on little cat feet," often silently, often without our knowing it, too often without our noticing.

It's possible to have too much in life. Too many clothes jade our appreciation of new ones; too much money can out us out of touch with life; too much free time and dull the edge of the soul. We need sometimes to come very near the bone so tha we can taste the marrow of life, rather than its superfluities.

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.

Getting to know ourselves and learning to control ourselves are the two great tasks of life. Don't make up strange and exotic 'penances.' Simply say no to yourself once a day, and you will be on the road to sanctity for the rest of your life.

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.

Life is an exercise in the development of feeling. When we repress feelings, we become sour and judgmental. When we live awash in great feeling over small things, we become jaded long before we have even begun to enjoy. When feelings are in balance they sweeten long days and great distances with gratitude and hope.

Old age tells us that we ourselves have failed often, have never really done anything completely right, have never truly been perfect - anad that is completely all right. We are who we are - and so is everyone else.

Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often - in some instances for our lifetime - before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy.

But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.

June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.

Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.

I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.

Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.

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.

Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.

If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.

Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.

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.

Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?

Peace comes from living a measured life. Peace comes from attending to every part of my world in a sacramental way. My relationships are not what I do when I have time left over from my work. . . . Reading is not something I do when life calms down. Prayer is not something I do when I feel like it. They are all channels of hope and growth for me. They must all be given their due.

The liturgical year is the year that sets out to attune the life of the Christian to the life of Jesus, the Christ. It proposes, year after year, to immerse us over and over again into the sense and substance of the Christian life until, eventually we become what we say we are - followers of Jesus all the way to the heart of God

The vision of a culture lies in what becomes its major institutions, in what it remembers as its most impacting events, in who it sees as its heroes.

We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is

Beauty scatters the seeds of hope in us.

A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.

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.

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.

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.

Judaism calls for us to honor the rhythm of human life, the demands of the human community around us, the call of the divine order as the filter and scale for the decisions that drive our own small lives. We do not rule the universe, Judaism reminds us. God does. We are not its standard or its norms. We are only its keepers, its agents, its stewards. To do right by the universe at large is the measure of a happiness framed with the entire cosmos in mind but lived in microcosms across time.

Living well has something to do with the spirituality of wholeheartedness, of seeing life more as a grace than as a penance, as time to be lived with eager expectation of its goodness, not in dread of its challenges.

Imagine how happy, how holy, life would be if we ever really learn to see beauty.

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

We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.

We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.'

Precisely because of the greatness of God, we don't have to be great at all. Just in awe.

Hospitality is simply love on the loose.

The message we have internalized is clear - we are what we do and what we own, not what we are inside ourselves. Where it counts!

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

It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are - and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside.