Quotes by Nuns - Page 3

If you are joyful, do not worry about lukewarmness. Joy will shine in your eyes and in your look, in your conversation and in your countenance. You will not be able to hide it because joy overflows.

Mother Teresa

Joy is strength.

Mother Teresa

Joy must be one of the pivots of our life. It is the token of a generous personality. Sometimes it is also a mantle that clothes a life of sacrifice and self-giving. A person who has this gift often reaches high summits. He or she is like sun in a community.

Mother Teresa

If I look at the mass I will never act.

Mother Teresa

The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.

Mother Teresa

Let us make one point, that we meet each other with a smile, when it is difficult to smile. Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.

Mother Teresa

For now, this afternoon, you saw and touchedmy heart, dissolved and liquid in your hands.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace.

Mother Teresa

In the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world.

Mother Teresa

We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.

Mother Teresa

One will abide, and will confess that another is nobler than he, that another is richer, more handsome, and even that he is more learned, but that another is richer in reason scarcely any will confess: Rare is he who will concede genius.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.

Corita Kent

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Corita Kent

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.

Corita Kent

Consider everything an experiment.

Corita Kent

God hasn't called us to be successful, just faithful.

Mother Teresa

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

Mother Teresa

[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in this one thing thou shouldst have had little trust in me I vehemently grieved and was ashamed. For I (God [knows]) would without hesitation precede or follow thee to the Vulcanian fires according to thy word. For not with me was my heart, but with thee. But now, more than ever, if it be not with thee, it is nowhere. For without thee it cannot anywhere exist.

Héloïse d'Argenteuil

[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.

Héloïse d'Argenteuil

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

Héloïse d'Argenteuil

Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!

Héloïse d'Argenteuil

Friendship is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship - real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge - is impossible.Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others.

Joan D. Chittister

To pray in the midst of the mundane is simply and strongly to assert that this dull and tiring day is holy and its simple labors are the stuff of God's saving presence for me now. To pray simply because it is prayer time is no small act of immersion in the God who is willing to wait for us to be conscious, to be ready, to be willing to become new in life. Prayer, Benedictine spirituality demonstrates, is not a matter of mood. To pray only when we feel like it is more to seek consolation than to risk conversion. To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better opportunities. To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer. The time must be taken. There will always be something more pressing to do, something more important to be about than the apparently fruitless, empty act of prayer. But when that attitude takes over, we have begun the last trip down a very short road because, without prayer, the energy for the rest of life runs down. The fuel runs out. We become our own worst enemies: we call ourselves too tired and too busy to pray when, in reality, we are too tired and too busy not to pray. Eventually, the burdens of the day wear us down and we no longer remember why we decided to do what we're doing: work for this project, marry this woman, have these children, minister in this place. And if I cannot remember why I decided to do this, I cannot figure out how I can go on with it. I am tired and the vision just gets dimmer and dimmer.

Joan D. Chittister

One of the functions of leadership is to lead, and weak managers may simply check and check and check with others because they are not capable of leading when it is required of them to lead. Benedict says that in matters of importance the abbot or prioress is to ask everyone in the community, 'starting with the youngest,' and then the abbot or prioress is to 'do what seems best.

Joan D. Chittister

Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what y ou are expecting in life.

Joan D. Chittister

It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment.

Joan D. Chittister

Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.

Joan D. Chittister

Humble people walk comfortably in every group. No one is either too beneath them or too above them for their own sense of well-being. They are who they are, people with as much to give as to get, and they know it. And because they're at ease with themselves, they can afford to be open with others... Having discovered who we are and having opened ourselves to life and having learned to be comfortable with it, we know that God is working in us. We know, most of all, that whatever happens we have nothing to fear... we are free of the false hopes and false faces and false needs that once held us down. We can fly now. Let all the others scratch and grapple for the plastic copy of life. We have found the real thing.

Joan D. Chittister

War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.

Joan D. Chittister

Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what you are expecting in life.

Joan D. Chittister

Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit.

Joan D. Chittister

It is not what to do, but how much love we put into the doing. We can do not greats, only small things with great love." - Mother Theresa

Mother Teresa

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, and must empty ourselves. Give yourself fully to God. 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

I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I'm supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I'm praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.

Mother Teresa

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.

Mother Teresa

It is a huge danger to pretend that awful things do not happen. But you need enough hope to keep going. I am trying to make hope. Flowers grow out of darkness.

Corita Kent

I think it is very good when people suffer. To me that is like the kiss of Jesus.

Mother Teresa

Don't belittle yourself. Be BIG yourself.

Corita Kent

We are all pencils in the hand of God.

Mother Teresa

I held the Host with two fingers and thought: How small Jesus made Himself, in order to show us that He doesn't expect great things of us, but rather little things with great love.

Mother Teresa

Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all.

Joan D. Chittister

Do we know our poor people? Do we know the poor in our house, in our family? Perhaps they are not hungry for a piece of bread. Perhaps our children, husband, wife, are not hungry, or naked, or dispossessed, but are you sure there is no one there who feels unwanted, deprived of affection?

Mother Teresa

Unless you are willing to do the ridiculous, God will not do the miraculous. When you have God, you don’t have to know everything about it; you just do it.

Mother Angelica

Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life.

Mother Teresa

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

Mother Teresa

Be happy in the moment, that's enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.

Mother Teresa

Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.

Mother Teresa

There is no danger if our prayer is without words or reflection because the good success of prayer depends neither on words nor on study. It depends upon the simple raising of our minds to God, and the more simple and stripped of feeling it is, the surer it is.

St. Jane Francis de Chantal

Great love can change small things into great ones, and it is only love which lends value to our actions. And the purer our love becomes, the less there will be within us for the flames of suffering to feed upon, and the suffering will cease to be a suffering for us; it will become a delight! By the grace of God, I have received such a disposition of heart that I am never so happy as when I suffer for Jesus, whom I love with every beat of my heart.

St. Faustina Kowalska

Let us all smile at each other for a smile is the beginning of love.

Mother Teresa

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

Mother Teresa

Prayer is the mortar that holds our house together.

Mother Teresa

The Lord likes small things best, especially those done with love.

Mother Teresa

From today onwards, I am going to strive for the greatest purity of soul, that the rays of God's grace may be reflected in all their brilliance.

St. Faustina Kowalska

God does not require that we be successful only that we be faithful.

Mother Teresa

In the final analysis it is between you and God, it was never between you and them anyway.

Mother Teresa

There are many people who can do big things, but there are very few people who will do the small things.

Mother Teresa

I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.

Mother Teresa

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

Mother Teresa

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