Joan D. Chittister Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• We may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Leadership, Kings, Truth

  48 Copy quote

• The human race sees with one eye, the male eye; hears with one ear, the male ear; and thinks with one half the human mind, the male mind. And the decisions we are making show we are not bringing to the agendas, and the questions and the problems of the world, all the resources of the world to solve them.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Eye, Thinking, Decision

  Source: sojo.net

  25 Copy quote

• A seeker searched for years to know the secret of achievement and success in human life. One night in a dream a sage appeared bearing the answer to the secret. The sage said simply: "Stretch out your hand and reach what you can." "No, it can't be that simple," the seeker said. And the sage said softly, "You are right, it is something harder. It is this: Stretch out your hand and reach what you cannot." Now that's vision.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Dream, Simple, Night

  23 Copy quote

• Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Our World, Together, Sacred

  10 Copy quote

• There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying - which it should be. Tye danger of old age is that we may start acting old.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Giving, Age, Acting

  7 Copy quote

• Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Religious, Children, Military

  8 Copy quote

• Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Life, Dream, Idols

  11 Copy quote

• Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Soul, Wish, Trying

  8 Copy quote

• The kind of "blind obedience" once theologized as the ultimate step to holiness, is itself blind. It blinds a person to the insights and foresight and moral perspective of anyone other than an authority figure.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Perspective, Holiness, Steps

  9 Copy quote

• Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Success, Thinking, People

  5 Copy quote

• Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Inspirational, Opposites, Catalyst

  8 Copy quote

• Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Work, Creativity, Expression

  17 Copy quote

• Don't worry about wearing the sign; be the sign. You don't have to wear a sandwich board saying, "I am religious and spiritual and know what you should do." You do have to be the best of the mystical presence that your tradition brings. Certainly in Christianity, that means that you begin to go through life putting on the mind of Jesus, trying to see the world as Jesus saw the world.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Spiritual, Religious, Jesus

  17 Copy quote

• In community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another and to ourselves...In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of GOD; it is another thing to practice it

  Joan D. Chittister

  Practice, Work Out, Community

  14 Copy quote

• Beauty scatters the seeds of hope in us.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Seeds

  26 Copy quote

• If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the kings acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Kings, People, Speak

  10 Copy quote

• To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Exercise, Goal, Long

  5 Copy quote

• faith isn't faith until it's all we have to hold on to and knowledge fails us. When we pray for faith, we automatically pray for darkness. Think about it.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Faith, Thinking, Darkness

  26 Copy quote

• A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Loyalty, Religious, Law

  35 Copy quote

• To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues.

  Joan D. Chittister

  May, Virtue, Dies

  7 Copy quote

• Life is an exercise in the development of feeling. When we repress feelings, we become sour and judgmental. When we live awash in great feeling over small things, we become jaded long before we have even begun to enjoy. When feelings are in balance they sweeten long days and great distances with gratitude and hope.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Gratitude, Distance, Exercise

  15 Copy quote

• Freedom, in childhood, may be the right to be totally self-centered. … But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Freedom, Self, Years

  21 Copy quote

• Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That's a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.

  Joan D. Chittister

  People, Routine, Asking

  21 Copy quote

• I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Mirrors, Self, Taught Us

  16 Copy quote

• But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.

  Joan D. Chittister

  World, Aging, This World

  17 Copy quote

Page 3 of 6

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin