Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.
-Pope John XXlll
Endurance is not an exercise in reckless machoism. It is not an adolescent attempt to prove that we can take pain. It is, in fact, a very feminine way to look at the world. It allows us to be committed and realistic at the same time. We do what we do, not because we are sure to succeed at it, but because it brings out something good in us that nothing else can touch.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
– Henry David Thoreau
If you seek what is honorable, what is good, what is the truth of your life, all the other things you could not imagine come as a matter of course.
-Oprah Winfrey
“The poor are always prophetic. As true prophets always point out, they reveal God’s design. That is why we should take time to listen to them. And that means staying near them, because they speak quietly and infrequently; they are afraid to speak out, they lack confidence in themselves because they have been broken and oppressed. But if we listen to them, they will bring us back to the essential.”
-Jean Vanier, Community And Growth
Letting go is like releasing a tight string at the core of yourself, one you’ve spent your whole life winding and maintaining. When you let go, you grow still and silent. You learn to sit among the cornstalks and wait with God.
-Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits
“To go out of ourselves” is to act at the very summit of our being, not moved by our own nature but moved by God Who is at once infinitely above us and Who yet dwells in the depth of our being.
– Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‘I’m a representative”.
– Maya Angelou
“I discovered later, …, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“But Jesus accepts what we give, blesses it, breaks it open, and magnifies it. Often in ways that we don’t see or cannot see. Or will not be able to see in this lifetime. Who knows what a kind word does? Who knows what a single act of charity will do? Sometimes the smallest word or gesture can change a life.
James Martin, Jesus: A Pilgrimage
