A Quote by Joan D. Chittister

The God who made us dust knows we're dust. We don't have to feel like perpetual failures because we aren't more than we are, and we don't have to be in contest and contention with everybody around us, because once I know myself and realize I have limitations, then two things happen: I realize my need for you, and I do not expect more from you than I expect from myself. So mercy comes with it, joy comes with it, authenticity comes with it, and freedom comes with it.
I don't feel pressure because what everyone expects of me is what I expect of myself anyway. Everyone expects me to win this fight, I expect myself to win this fight. It's not any more pressure than what I put on myself. I don't suffer nerves, I don't feel pressure, I just go out and do what I need to do.
Every day, the humane societies execute thousands of dogs who tried all their lives to do their very best by their owners. These dogs are killed not because they are bad but because they are inconvenient. So as we need God more than he needs us, dogs need us more than we need them, and they know it.
The more normal it gets for people to see people of a gender or skin tone they wouldn't expect in jobs that they wouldn't expect, or speaking a way they wouldn't expect them to, the more it cultivates a sense that we share more than separates us.
I realize how myself and other people have started to almost fool ourselves that it's more important to us and more real than the real world, the offline world, and we value looking at our phone and pixels on a screen more than connecting eye to eye with a human being, which is terrifying to me because we're becoming robots.
We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.
I've never believed anyone could put more pressure on me than I put on myself. People expect great things from me. I expect great things from myself.
I think that we in the West expect people to adapt to our culture very, very quickly when they come to our country. But when we go over to someone else's, I don't think we are willing to meet them halfway like we expect them to meet us. I think having cultural sensitivity is a lot more important than we realize.
When I say 'The Hunger For More', it could be referring to more success. It could be more money, or respect, more power, more understanding. All of those things lead up to that hunger for more, because my more isn't everybody else's more. I feel like I made it already, because I got already what everybody on the corners of the neighborhood I grew up in is striving to get. God forbid anything happen to me, my family is straight. So anything that happens after this is just me progressing as a person.
Like many of you, I was concerned about going out into the world and doing something bigger than myself. Until someone smarter than myself made me realize that there is nothing bigger than myself.
You have developed the second attention much more than you realize and you use it more than you realize as a woman. That's why I feel women can attain enlightenment more easily than men.
It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.
We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.
I'm very direct. I don't have tantrums. I don't yell or shout. I do expect an awful lot from my staff, but no more than I expect of myself.
Immigrants to America help us with the work they do. They challenge us with new ideas, and they give us perspective. This is still the nation that more people around the world want to come to than any place else. That has to tell us something about ourselves. If around the world this is the place people want to come to so much, maybe there's more here than many of us realize-and that many of us can take advantage of.
I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.
Let us all be men and women in full. Let us expect from ourselves more than we think we can give, more than we think we can do and more than we think we already know.
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