Top 1200 St Francis Of Assisi Quotes & Sayings

The popularity of the famous device of the use of lands into England is said to be largely due to the mendicant friars of the then new Orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis, who, arriving in this country, in the first half of the thirteenth century, found themselves hampered by their own vows of poverty, no less than by the growing feeling against Mortmain in acquiring the provision of land absolutely necessary for their rapidly developing work.

I was studying Francis of Assisi for quite some time, when Benedict was still the pope. And I was studying it for a song that I did for my last album, 'Banga.'

Having grown up Protestant, I was unfamiliar with St. Francis. Then I watched the movie 'Brother Sun, Sister Moon'... I just became fascinated with the character of St. Francis. What I saw in that movie was a man who had fallen in love with God, someone for whom God was everything.

One of the greatest sermons ever pronounced on missionary work is this simple thought attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.” Opportunities to do so are all around us. Do not miss them by waiting too long on the road to Damascus.

The best things that have been written, almost, are by Catholics during the counter Reformation: Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis de Sales, John of the Cross, St. Theresa of ?vila.....great stuff.

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

I've got a statue of St. Francis in my front yard, and I'm not even a practicing Catholic.

As much as I loved the model of St. Francis, I realized that I couldn't afford to be poor, because unlike St. Francis, I'm not celibate. I was enlightened that God's call to me was not poverty but generosity and simplicity. And I had to go back to the lesson I learned from my parents: that is, simplicity.

Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one.

[Pope] Francis communicates the pastoral embrace of the Church, the breadth and inclusiveness of Catholicism symbolized by the Bernini colonnade around St. Peter's Square, in a powerful way.

The whole world feels that it knows Francis, not so much because he follows Francis of Assisi but because he is always himself. We have seen him pay his own hotel bill and heard that Francis called Buenos Aires for a pair of ordinary black shoes, like John XXIII, who preferred stout peasant shoes to the traditional papal footwear.

Prime ministers require the hide of a rhinoceros, the morals of St. Francis, the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the leadership of Napoleon, the magnetism of a Beatle and the subtlety of Machiavelli.

The fact of the matter is that Buddhism has changed a lot. When St. Francis of Xavier arrived in Japan, he wrote back to the Vatican and made a joke. "It is unfortunate," he said, "that the Lutherans were here before me." By this he meant that Pure Land Buddhism was so much like Lutheranism.

Take good care of creation. St. Francis wanted that. People occasionally forgive, but nature never does. If we don't take care of the environment, there's no way of getting around it.

Do not allow your daughters to be taught letters by a man, though he be a St. Paul or St. Francis of Assissium. The saints are in Heaven.

Jose Ortega y Gasset says, "Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are." Asserting that character/community is formed, at least in part, by the physical landscape in which he/she resides. And this is underscored by the fact - and not all that long ago - that people and place were, in fact, synonymous: Sapho of Lesbos, for example. Or my middle namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi. Jesus of Nazareth.

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

[Pope Francis] did something that both his two predecessors had failed to do - John Paul II and Benedict. Francis met with the Russian patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. 'Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

At St. Francis de Sales in Atlanta, we do not have an organ. We do not have rehearsals during the week. We do not have a professional choir.

Pope Francis tells us who he is by pointing to Caravaggio's St. Matthew: 'Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.' He is telling us that he has experienced the same rush of speechless wonder and graced love Caravaggio depicts in his painting.

St. Francis of Assisi was hoeing his garden when someone asked what he would do if he were suddenly to learn that he would die before sunset that very day. "I would finish hoeing my garden," he replied.

When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.

In the Catholic Worker we must try to have the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the intellectual approach of St. Dominic, the easy conversations about things that matter of St. Philip Neri, the manual labor of St. Benedict.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

It is so beautifully ironic that St. Francis - the great lover of animals - is now a pigeon's target in countless yards.

Ethics has not only to do with mankind but with the animal creation as well. This is witnessed in the purpose of St. Francis of Assisi. Thus we shall arrive that ethics is reverence for all life. This is the ethic of love widened universally. It is the ethic of Jesus now recognized as a necessity of thought...Only a universal ethic which embraces every living creature can put us in touch with the universe and the will which is there manifest.

What St. Francis and St. Dominic have done, that, by God's grace, I will do.

I go back to Francis Schmidt. Francis Schmidt was the Ohio State coach who hired me.

The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

Small yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples.

The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament.

Few cities have been more definitely impressed upon the imagination of the world than San Francisco, this gray-hilled city on the peninsula by the hospitable bay, where Saint Francis protects the ships as he protected the birds of Assisi.

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Jesus is the mediator of justice; Mary obtains for us grace; for, as St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, St. Bernardine of Siena, St. Germanus, St. Antoninus, and others say, it is the will of God to dispense through the hands of Mary whatever graces he is pleased to bestow upon us. With God, the prayers of the saints are the prayers of His friends, but the prayers of Mary are the prayers of His mother.

The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid.... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.

Once the anchor of reason has been cut, ones craft may go anywhere. One may become a St Francis or equally a Hitler.

I’m indebted to the teachers who shaped me - from the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Croix Catholic elementary to the monks of St. John’s in Minnesota to my professors at Georgetown.

As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

Since I was part of the St. Francis College basketball team, I used to get the opportunity to go to various parts of the city for tournaments. It's during one such outing that I figured this is the Chowmahalla Palace! I still remember buying a ticket and getting into the palace with my team, all of us in our sports uniform.

In beautiful things St. Francis saw Beauty itself, and through His vestiges imprinted on creation he followed his Beloved everywhere, making from all things a ladder by which he could climb up and embrace Him who is utterly desirable.

The process of my transformation came to a head with my discovery of St. Francis of Assisi during a pilgrimage I went on with a scout troop from my school.

St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.

I was influenced very much by St. Francis of Assisi, whose idea was to radically live the gospel. He was not a priest, or even a brother. He was a layperson. His whole concept was to emulate Christ through the gospels, and to live it in a radical way.

To defend his purity, Saint Francis of Assisi rolled in the snow, Saint Benedict threw himself into a thorn bush, and Saint Bernard plunged into an icy pond... You - what have you done?

I think the Lord's Prayer is a very powerful prayer. And the prayer of St. Francis.

St. Luke again associates St. John with St. Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, when, after the Resurrection, that strange boldness had come upon the disciples.

St. Seraphim, like Francis of Assisi, talked to animals. One day two nuns saw him deep in conversation with a bear. The bears of the Russian forests are very ferocious, and the two women were terrified. But Seraphim reassured them and showed them that he who is sanctified lives in peace with all creation, just as Adam did before the Fall.

I'm indebted to the teachers who shaped me - from the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Croix Catholic elementary to the monks of St. John's in Minnesota to my professors at Georgetown.

In a world characterized by loneliness and despair, we can reach out in love to those around us. Or, as St. Francis once said, we can "preach the gospel all the time; if necessary, use words."

The vocation of being a 'protector' [. . .] means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us [. . .] In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts!

The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life-until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.

The hope is that papal calls for a New Pentecost, which go back to St. John XXIII, and papal calls for a New Evangelization, which go back to Vatican II and especially to St. John Paul II, can come together. Pope Francis' vision is to bring together the reality of a New Pentecost with the urgency of a New Evangelization.

Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi.

Having grown up Protestant, I was unfamiliar with St. Francis. Then I watched the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon... I just became fascinated with the character of St. Francis. What I saw in that movie was a man who had fallen in love with God, someone for whom God was everything.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.

My best chance is that, in a happy moment, I hit upon St Francis as the subject for a series of plays. Others might have written them better: but, as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine.