Wisdom Quotes - Page 123

Apothegms are the wisdom of the past condensed for the instruction and guidance of the present.

As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.

And, if we have any evidence that the wisdom which formed the plan is in the man, we have the very same evidence, that the power which executed it is in him also.

In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar.

It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as "new men" regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.

In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.

We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.

It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception.

The end of the world will be legal.

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him.

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.

In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything.

Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.

You're thinking to yourself, 'How is it possible that I am going to pay back $150,000 in student loans? I'm never going to pay that back. What am I going to do?' Listen to me and listen to me good, class of 2013. I want you to think back to all of these things you said to yourself, 'I can't do that. I can't palpate a cow. And what's worse, palpating a cow or taking semen from a horse?' But you did it, didn't you?

Beware of people preaching simple solutions to complex problems. If the answer was easy someone more intelligent would have thought of it a long time ago - complex problems invariably require complex and difficult solutions.

Keeping the commandments . . . is at once a demonstration of our intelligence, our knowledge, our character, and our wisdom.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.