Caryll Houselander Quotes

• Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose in our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us, Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.

  Caryll Houselander

  Life, God, Religious

  Caryll Houselander, Marie Anne Mayeski (1991). “A Rocking-Horse Catholic: A Caryll Houselander Reader”, p.74, Rowman & Littlefield

  102 Copy quote

• Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat.... the flowers under your feet are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only: "See how I love you."

  Caryll Houselander

  Love, Life, God

  Caryll Houselander, Thomas Hoffman (2000). “A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander”, p.38, Rowman & Littlefield

  62 Copy quote

• Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.

  Caryll Houselander

  Home, Laughing, Soul

  Caryll Houselander, Thomas Hoffman (2000). “A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander”, p.80, Rowman & Littlefield

  54 Copy quote

• By his own will Christ was dependent on Mary during Advent: he was absolutely helpless; he could go nowhere but where she chose to take him; he could not speak; her breathing was his breath; his heart beat in the beating of her heart.... In the seasons of our Advent - waking, working, eating, sleeping, being - each breath is a breathing of Christ into the world.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Inspiration, Heart

  Caryll Houselander, Marie Anne Mayeski (1991). “A Rocking-Horse Catholic: A Caryll Houselander Reader”, p.73, Rowman & Littlefield

  39 Copy quote

• The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Inspiration, Healing

  Caryll Houselander, Thomas Hoffman (2000). “A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander”, p.52, Rowman & Littlefield

  39 Copy quote

• I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God's idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us.

  Caryll Houselander

  Thinking, Ideas, Perfection

  Caryll Houselander (2005). “Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings”

  58 Copy quote

• We must carry Jesus in our hearts to wherever He wants to go, and there are many places to which He may never go unless we take Him to them. None of us knows when the loveliest hour of our life is striking. It may be when we take Christ for the first time to that grey office in the city where we work, to the wretched lodging of that poor man who is an outcast, to the nursery of that pampered child, to that battleship, airfield, or camp

  Caryll Houselander

  Life, Faith, Christian

  60 Copy quote

• Christ used the flesh and blood of Mary for his life on earth, the Word of love was uttered in her heartbeat. Christ used his own body to utter his love on earth; his perfectly real body, with bone and sinew and blood and tears; Christ uses our bodies to express his love on earth, our humanity. A Christian life is a sacramental life, it is not a life lived only in the mind, only by the soul... Our humanity is the substance of the sacramental life of Christ in us, like the wheat for the host, like the grape for the chalice.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Christian, Real

  Caryll Houselander, Marie Anne Mayeski (1991). “A Rocking-Horse Catholic: A Caryll Houselander Reader”, p.49, Rowman & Littlefield

  46 Copy quote

• God speaks silently, God speaks in your heart; if your heart is noisy, chattering, you will not hear.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Inspiration, Heart

  Caryll Houselander, Thomas Hoffman (2000). “A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander”, p.38, Rowman & Littlefield

  40 Copy quote

• It is a time of darkness, of faith. We shall not see Christ's radiance in our lives yet; it is still hidden in our darkness; nevertheless, we must believe that He is growing in our lives; we must believe it so firmly that we cannot help relating everything, literally everything, to this almost incredible reality.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Believe, Inspiration

  Caryll Houselander, Thomas Hoffman (2000). “A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander”, p.3, Rowman & Littlefield

  42 Copy quote

• The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.

  Caryll Houselander

  God, Jesus, Christian Inspirational

  62 Copy quote

• Advent is the season of the secret, the secret of the growth of Christ, of divine love growing in silence…For nine months, Christ grew in his mother's body. By his own will, she formed him from herself, from the simplicity of her daily life.

  Caryll Houselander

  Mother, Silence, Simplicity

  32 Copy quote

• It is part of God's plan for us that Christ shall come to us in everyone; it is in their particular role that we must learn to know him. He may come as a little child, making enormous demands, giving enormous consolation. He may come as a stranger, so that we must give the hospitality to a stranger that we should like to give to Christ.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Children, Inspiration

  "A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander".

  27 Copy quote

• In every passerby, everywhere - Christ . . . He is in everyone - there can be no outcasts.

  Caryll Houselander

  Christ, Outcast, Passerby

  26 Copy quote

• There is no way of learning of God except through the adventure of our own heart.

  Caryll Houselander

  Heart, Adventure, Way

  21 Copy quote

• The Passion of Christ was an experience which included in itself every experience except sin, of every member of the human race. If one may say this with reverence, the fourteen incidents of the Stations of the Cross show not only the suffering but the Psychology of Christ. Above all, they show, in detail, his way of transforming suffering by love. He shows us, step by step, how that plan of love can be carried out by men, women, and children today, both alone in the loneliness of their individual lives and together in communion with one another.

  Caryll Houselander

  Friday, Children, Loneliness

  23 Copy quote

• We are only syllables of the perfect Word.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Inspiration, Perfect

  Caryll Houselander, Thomas Hoffman (2000). “A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander”, p.2, Rowman & Littlefield

  23 Copy quote

• We are the mediocre, we are the half givers, we are the half lovers, we are the savourless salt. Break the hard crust of complacency. Quicken in us the sharp grace of desire.

  Caryll Houselander

  Grace, Desire, Complacency

  Caryll Houselander (1945). “The Flowering Tree”

  17 Copy quote

• Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

  Caryll Houselander

  I Love You, Falling In Love, People

  Caryll Houselander, Marie Anne Mayeski (1991). “A Rocking-Horse Catholic: A Caryll Houselander Reader”, p.91, Rowman & Littlefield

  21 Copy quote

• Christ subjected himself to the law of the seed in the earth, to the law of rest and growth. He was "one of the children of the year," growing through rest, secret in his mothers womb, receiving the warmth of the sun through her, living the life of dependence, helplessness, littleness, darkness, and silence which, by a mystery of the Eternal Law, is the life of natural growth.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Mother, Children

  Caryll Houselander, Thomas Hoffman (2000). “A Child in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander”, p.96, Rowman & Littlefield

  13 Copy quote

• We are united to Him, we are one, and it is when His Passion becomes real to us, through experience and love, that we grow aware of His presence in us.

  Caryll Houselander

  Faith, Real, Inspiration

  9 Copy quote

• The love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.

  Caryll Houselander

  Heart, Greed, Soul

  24 Copy quote

• God is everywhere: yes, but how dim faith is, what a remote idea heaven is, in the modern world!

  Caryll Houselander

  Ideas, Heaven, World

  10 Copy quote

• Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

  Caryll Houselander

  Powerful, Delay, Camouflage

  13 Copy quote

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