Quotes by Nuns - Page 2

Being rejected by someone you knew you never stood a chance with is like pouring salt on a wound that already has salt in it. It preserves the hurt.
Maria G. Cope
If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well.
Helen Prejean
[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of
Helen Prejean
The Holy Spirit does not speak to a soul that is distracted and garrulous. He speaks by His quiet inspirations to a soul that is recollected, to a soul that knows how to keep silence.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
For those who are with greatness bornShould live not for themselves alone.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
O God, help me to believe the truth about myself, no matter how beautiful it is.
Macrina Wiederkehr
Joy is a net of love in which you can catch souls.
Mother Teresa
The greater evil who is in-When both in wayward paths are straying? The poor sinner for the painOr he who pays for the sin?
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty.
Mother Teresa
Poverty was not created by God. It is we who have caused it, you and I through our egotism.
Mother Teresa
A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted.
Mother Teresa
The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we are perfectly happy.
Mother Teresa
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa
The moment passed — but the darkness is so dark, and the pain is so painful. – But I accept whatever He gives and I give whatever He takes.
Mother Teresa
Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life.
Joan D. Chittister
The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.
Joan D. Chittister
In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.
Mother Teresa
I still think that the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one... That is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.
Mother Teresa
If the angels were capable of envy, they would envy us for two things: one is the receiving of Holy Communion, and the other is suffering.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
Some day, we will know the value of suffering, but then we will no longer be able to suffer.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
Truth wears a crown of thorns
Maria Faustina Kowalska
I know i am touching the living body of Christ in the broken bodies of the hungry and the suffering.
Mother Teresa
It would take me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough.
Helen Prejean
Suffering is the greatest treasure on earth; it purifies the soul. In suffering, we learn who our true friend is.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it is said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.
Mother Teresa
I will never attend an anti-war rally; if you have a peace rally, invite me.
Mother Teresa
A person could last a long while without touch, but once someone had experienced the comfort, joy, and sheer relief of another human body close, the desire to experience that again was hard to deny.
Mary Johnson
In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world today than that one.
Mother Teresa
The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.
Mother Teresa
Christ came to be Father's compassion to the world. Be kind in your actions. Do not think that you are the only one who can do efficient work, work worth showing. This makes you harsh in your judgment of others who may not have the same talents. Do your best and trust that others do their best. And be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Mother Teresa
Am I ever angry or frustrated? I only feel angry sometimes when I see waste, when things that we waste are what people need, things that would save them from dying. Frustrated? No, never.
Mother Teresa
One of the realities we're all called to go through is to move from repulsion to compassion and from compassion to wonderment.
Mother Teresa
Give, but give until it hurts.
Mother Teresa
Jesus loves hidden souls. A hidden flower is the most fragrant. I must strive to make the interior of my soul a resting place for the Heart of Jesus.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your weakness.
Mother Teresa
Let Him empty and transform you ;and afterwards fill the chalice of your hearts to the brim, that you in your turn, may give of your abundance. Seek Him. Knowledge will make you strong as death. Love Him trustfully without looking back, without fear. Believe that Jesus and Jesus alone is life. Serve Jesus, casting aside and forgetting all that troubles or worries you, make loved the love that is not loved.
Mother Teresa
Like a great waterwheel, the liturgical year goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime. So goes the liturgical year through all the days of our lives. /it concentrates us on the two great poles of the faith - the birth and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But as Christmas and Easter trace the life of Jesus for us from beginning to end, the liturgical year does even more: it also challenges our own life and vision and sense of meaning. Both a guide to greater spiritual maturity and a path to a deepened spiritual life, the liturgical year leads us through all the great questions of faith as it goes. It rehearses the dimensions of life over and over for us all the years of our days. It leads us back again and again to reflect on the great moments of the life of Jesus and so to apply them to our own ... As the liturgical year goes on every day of our lives, every season of every year, tracing the steps of Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, so does our own life move back and forth between our own beginnings and endings, between our own struggles and triumphs, between the rush of acclamation and the crush of abandonment. It is the link between Jesus and me, between this life and the next, between me and the world around me, that is the gift of the liturgical year. The meaning and message of the liturgical year is the bedrock on which we strike our own life's direction. Rooted in the Resurrection promise of the liturgical year, whatever the weight of our own pressures, we maintain the course. We trust in the future we cannot see and do only know because we have celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus year after year. In His life we rest our own. ― Joan D. Chittister, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life - The Ancient Practices Series
Joan D. Chittister
I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve becuase I love Jesus.
Mother Teresa
Hungry for love, He looks at you. Thirsty for kindness, He begs of you. Naked for loyalty, He hopes in you. Homeless for shelter in your heart, He asks of you. Will you be that one to Him?
Mother Teresa
The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn . . . spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end . . . earth scents and the sky winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.
Monica Baldwin
The nation... doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are.
Edith Stein: Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.
Joan D. Chittister
These are the few ways we can practice humility:To speak as little as possible of one's self.To mind one's own business.Not to want to manage other people's affairs.To avoid curiosity.To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.To pass over the mistakes of others.To accept insults and injuries.To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.To be kind and gentle even under provocation.Never to stand on one's dignity.To choose always the hardest.
Mother Teresa
It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love is put in the giving.
Mother Teresa
You will never truly realize God is all you need until He becomes all you have.
Mother Teresa
Prayer makes your heart bigger, until it is capable of containing the gift of God himself. Prayer begets faith, faith begets love, and love begets service on behalf of the poor.
Mother Teresa
May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.
Mother Teresa
In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.
Mother Teresa
Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.
Mother Teresa
Humility is truth, therefore in all sincerity we must be able to look up and say, "I can do all things in Him who strengthens me." By yourself you can do nothing, have nothing but sin, weakness and misery. All the gifts of nature and grace you have them from God.
Mother Teresa
Yet while I do this work because of my faith, I also recognize of course that in a pluralistic society there are many different perspectives. It is both unrealistic and wrong to insist that everyone hold my views, my faith. The place we meet, in our differences, is in the founding documents of our democratic republic.
Simone Campbell
A woman's greatest and most perduring failure will be her failure to love. It is certainly not without significance that so many women presently pressing for power on the political, sociological or ecclesial scene are unbeautiful in their unsmilling press for dominance. Contorted faces and clenched fists are particularly repellant in woman, who is gifted with unique powers to radiate love and extend healing hands.
Mother Mary Francis P.C.C.
How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers." ~ Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Mother Teresa
Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of Christ risen.
Mother Teresa
Although we cannot command it, we choose joy, making a deliberate commitment to happiness (essentially another word for peace).
Wendy Beckett
In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.
Wendy Beckett
This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.
Wendy Beckett
Act in such a way that all those who come in contact with you will go away joyful. Sow happiness about you because you have received much from God; give, then, generously to others. They should take leave of you with their hearts filled with joy, even if they have no more than touched the hem of your garment.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
Joy is the net of love by which we can capture souls. God loves the person who gives with joy. Whoever gives with joy gives more. The best way to show our gratitude to God and to people is to accept with joy.
Mother Teresa