Dorothee Solle Quotes

#1. God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God's, that will comfort them.

Dorothee Solle

#2. The more people anticipate the elimination of suffering the less strength they have actually to oppose it. Whoever deals with his personal suffering only in the way our society has taught him - through illusion, minimization, suppression, apathy - will deal with societal suffering in the same way.

Dorothee Solle

#3. A competitive society is a society of envy.

Dorothee Solle

#4. God has no other hands than ours.

Dorothee Solle

#5. Bible texts are best read with a pair of glasses made out of today's newspaper.

Dorothee Solle

#6. To be content with the world as it is is to be dead.

Dorothee Solle

#7. Religion is made up of unrestrained wishes.

Dorothee Solle

#8. What is important is not what someone is but what he is waiting for. Not the events of life but its possibilities.

Dorothee Solle

#9. Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing, or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition.

Dorothee Solle

#10. Religion does not confirm that there are hungry people in the world; it interprets the hungry to be our brethren whom we allow to starve.

Dorothee Solle

#11. If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.

Dorothee Solle

#12. Toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering.

Dorothee Solle

#13. Our whole life consists of despairing of an answer and seeking an answer.

Dorothee Solle

#14. One of the oldest longings of all people of mystical sensibility is to be rid of disguises to the point of becoming naked.

Dorothee Solle

#15. To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names.

Dorothee Solle

#16. If we had possessions, Francis would say, we would also need weapons. He held on to the inescapable link of poverty and peace.

Dorothee Solle

#17. A language that takes our emotions seriously and gives them real weight in our lives encourages us to think and be and act differently.

Dorothee Solle

#18. We are afraid of religion because it interprets rather than observance. Religion does not confirm that there are hungry people in the world; it interprets the hungry to be our brethren whom we allowed to starve.

Dorothee Solle

#19. This is the purpose of theology. By it my life becomes clearer and more conscious.

Dorothee Solle

#20. With the disappearance of God the Ego moves forward to become the sole divinity.

Dorothee Solle