Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can't write about things without doing them. You just have to live that same way.
When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.
If you feed the poor, you're a saint. If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist.
We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.
The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community.
There's enough hate in the world. I command you to love. And you have to make an effort.
We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.
Your love for God is only as great as the love you have for the person you love the least.
One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word.
Be close enough to people so that you are indifferent to the material. And also have faith.
We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.
With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily. Without prayer, how grim a journey!
Our rule is the works of mercy... It is the way of sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence.
True obedience is a matter of love, which makes it voluntary, not compelled by fear or force.
It is penance to work, to give oneself to others, to endure the pinpricks of community living.
As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over.
Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.
We should live in such a way that our lives wouldn't make much sense if the gospel were not true.
We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.
If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.
No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.
Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.
Idealism in the young, I guess I'm saying, is curiosity as well as goodness trying to express itself.
Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate.
I think that just as we're in the nuclear era we're also in an era of non-violence. It's undefeatable.
To me, birth control and abortion are genocide.I say, make room for children, don't do away with them.
Together with the works of mercy, feeding, sheltering, and clothing our brothers, we must indoctrinate.
Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles!
The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.
The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it's right.
God forbid we should have great institutions. The thing is to have many small centres. The ideal is community.
When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.
I think one of the things we must constantly keep in mind is, 'If anybody hits you on one cheek, turn the other.'
There is something so horrifying and so sad when people are living alone. That is why the old and lonely come to us.
Common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind.
When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.
Dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.
I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance.
It wasn't until Castro marched triumphantly into Cuba that you might say the whole thing grew into a Marxist revolution.
Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?
For me Christ was not to be bought for thirty pieces of silver but with my heart's blood. We buy not cheap in this market.
The holy man was the whole man, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was.
Thank God that He has permitted us to live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.
There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.
What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships?
An act of love, a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love and hope of all.
Some have more capacity. Some proceed a few steps along the way. But Christ seemed to love all men. He desired all to be saved.
Everything a baptized person does each day should be directly or indirectly related to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.