Faith Quotes - Page 105

Each one of us needs time and space for recollection, meditation and calmness.... Thanks be to God that this is so! In fact, this need tells us that we are not made for work alone, but also to think, to reflect or even simply to follow with our minds and our hearts a tale, a story in which to immerse ourselves, in a certain sense to lose ourselves to find ourselves subsequently enriched.

The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice - all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we are in need of a new evangelization - if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works... this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life - he who is the Gospel personified.

If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful, and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed.

The Church does not engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by "attraction": just as Christ "draws all to himself" by the power of his love, culminating in the sacrifice of the Cross, so the Church fulfills her mission.

That is very high praise, which is given you by faithful witness.

Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

True faith nor biddeth nor abideth form, The bended knee, the eye uplift; is all Which men need render; all which God can bear. What to the faith are forms? A passing speck, A crow upon the sky.

The fastest way to know God is to serve the God in someone else.

A saint is Christ's bride, totally attached, faithful, dependent. A saint is also totally independent, detached from idols and from other husbands... A saint is higher than anyone else in the world. A saint is the real mountain climber. A saint is also lower than anyone else in the world. As with water, he flows to the lowest places - like Calcutta.

God continuously comes into the world in two places - at the altar and in the womb.

Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul.

The field of earth and of our human nature is now no longer barren but full of the seed of divine life. But it takes time for the seed to grow, for the Kingdom to come, and we are commanded to pray and work for that coming, that growth, even if we do not yet see the fruits, or even the blossoms, or even the leaves...

Bad times make good people, as mountainous pressures make diamonds or as fire tempers steel.

Love is faith's flower, hope is its stem. Grace comes into us by faith, like water through the roots of a tree. It rises in us by hope, like sap rising through the trunk of a tree. And it matures in us by [love] as fruit matures on a tree's branches, fruit for the neighbor's eating.

We do not do good works to get into heaven; we do good works because heaven has gotten to us.

The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are, and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality, it connects you to reality.

Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature.

And it's one thing to give people freedom and something else to deny the rights of Christians to assert their faith in order to keep Hindus from feeling upset.

Youth without faith is a day without sun.

The great enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but the good which is not good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.

Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.

Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.

It was seldom that I attended any religious meetings, as my parents had not much faith in and were never so unfortunate as to unite themselves with any of the religious sects.

Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.