Top 100 Joan D. Chittister Quotes
#1. In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.
Joan D. Chittister
#2. Imagine how happy, how holy, life would be if we ever really learn to see beauty.
Joan D. Chittister
#3. Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.
Joan D. Chittister
#4. The secret of life is to let every segment of it produce its own yield at its own pace. Every period has something new to teach us. The harvest of youth is achievement; the harvest of middle-age is perspective; the harvest of age is wisdom; the harvest of life is serenity.
Joan D. Chittister
#6. Today we live in a world that judges its achievements by speed and busyness. ... We are so busy making things happen that we have little time left to think about the value of what is happening. We urgently need people who concentrate on the meaning of life rather than simply the speed.
Joan D. Chittister
#7. 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
#8. Compassion for the other comes out of our ability to accept ourselves. Until we realize both our own weaknesses and our own privileges, we can never tolerate lack of status and depth of weakness in the other.
Joan D. Chittister
#9. Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.
Joan D. Chittister
#10. Better to walk through life simply and without masks, than to lose ourselves in the pursuit of identities that are purely cosmetic and commercial. Then, at least, we will be known for what we are rather than for what we are not.
Joan D. Chittister
#11. Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.
Joan D. Chittister
#12. My limitations make space for the gifts of other people. Without the grace of our limitations we would be isolated, dry, and insufferable creatures indeed.
Joan D. Chittister
#13. June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.
Joan D. Chittister
#14. Only ideas keep ideas flowing. When we close our minds to what is new, simply because we decide not to bother with it, we close our minds to our responsibility to ourselves - and to others - to keep on growing.
Joan D. Chittister
#15. It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are - and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside ...
Joan D. Chittister
#16. We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.
Joan D. Chittister
#17. 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
#18. The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.
Joan D. Chittister
#19. Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.
Joan D. Chittister
#20. Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long.
Joan D. Chittister
#23. Holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.
Joan D. Chittister
#24. We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.
Joan D. Chittister
#25. Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life.
Joan D. Chittister
#26. We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth.
Joan D. Chittister
#27. For the Jew, Passover is a sign of salvation, of "God with us" at a particular historical moment in the past. For the Christian, Easter is a sign of "God with us" in the past, but with us now also and at a time to come, as well.
Joan D. Chittister
#28. I learned that the Italians are right. It isn't what happens to us that counts. It's what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference
Joan D. Chittister
#29. A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done.
Joan D. Chittister
#30. Solitude is not a way of running away from life ... from our feelings. On the contrary. This is the time we sort them out, air them, get over them, and go on without the burden of yesterday.
Joan D. Chittister
#31. Feminists are asking women and men not to buy into patriarchal systems that destroy them both. Feminism comes to bring both men and women to the fullness of life, the wholeness of soul, for which we were all made in the image and likeness of God.
Joan D. Chittister
#33. To be contemplative we must become converted to the consciousness that makes us one with the universe, in tune with the cosmic voice of God.
Joan D. Chittister
#34. The message we have internalized is clear - we are what we do and what we own, not what we are inside ourselves. Where it counts!
Joan D. Chittister
#35. Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.
Joan D. Chittister
#36. Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.
Joan D. Chittister
#37. Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.
Joan D. Chittister
#38. Precisely because of the greatness of God, we don't have to be great at all. Just in awe.
Joan D. Chittister
#39. It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me.
Joan D. Chittister
#40. A hard heart makes for hard judgments; a compassionate heart understands the humanity of the one we presume to judge.
Joan D. Chittister
#41. "When we do not know what harbor we are making for," the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, "no wind is the right wind." Persons have vision only when they have a dream that drives them on.
Joan D. Chittister
#42. Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.
Joan D. Chittister
#43. Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.
Joan D. Chittister
#44. It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
Joan D. Chittister
#45. In Benedictine spirituality, work is what we do to continue what God wanted done ... God goes on creating through us. Consequently a life spent serving God must be a life spent giving to others what we have been given.
Joan D. Chittister
#46. Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.
Joan D. Chittister
#47. It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.
Joan D. Chittister
#48. We must learn to pray out of our weaknesses so that God can become our
strength.
Joan D. Chittister
#49. Imagination begins when it' s raining too hard to go out and play and you become really absorbed in something you would never have thought of doing had the sun come out as usual. In which case, thank God for the rain.
Joan D. Chittister
#50. Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.
Joan D. Chittister
#51. To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues.
Joan D. Chittister
#52. Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.
Joan D. Chittister
#53. But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us - and are not ours at the same time.
Joan D. Chittister
#54. Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.
Joan D. Chittister
#55. We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.
Joan D. Chittister
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. We should employ our passions in the service of life," Sir Richard Steele wrote, "not spend life in the service of our passions.
Joan D. Chittister
#59. Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.
Joan D. Chittister
#60. Two ideas militate against our consciously contributing to a better world. The idea that we can do everything or the conclusion that we can do nothing to make this globe a better place to live are both temptations of the most insidious form. One leads to arrogance; the other to despair.
Joan D. Chittister
#61. Getting to know ourselves and learning to control ourselves are the two great tasks of life. Don't make up strange and exotic 'penances.' Simply say no to yourself once a day, and you will be on the road to sanctity for the rest of your life.
Joan D. Chittister
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Oppressors do not get to be oppressors in a single sweep. They manage it because little by little, we make them that. We overlook too much in the beginning and wonder why we lost control in the end.
Joan D. Chittister
#65. Indeed, the big decisions in life are hardly ever clear - except for one. And that one is piercingly clear: life is a series of dilemmas, of options, of conundrums, of possibilities taken and not taken. Negotiating these moments well is of the essence of the life well lived.
Joan D. Chittister
#66. We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been.
Joan D. Chittister
#68. Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.
Joan D. Chittister
#69. But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.
Joan D. Chittister
#70. Prayer can be an easy substitute for real spirituality. It would be impossible to have spirituality without prayer, of course, but it is certainly possible to pray without having a spirituality at all. How do you know? 'Am I becoming kinder?' is a good place to start.
Joan D. Chittister
#72. 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
#73. War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.
Joan D. Chittister
#74. Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life.
Joan D. Chittister
#75. The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins.
Joan D. Chittister
#78. We fail to move beyond what is safe, we abandon our dreams in favor of what is sure rather than strive for what is best for us.
Joan D. Chittister
#79. The vision of a culture lies in what becomes its major institutions, in what it remembers as its most impacting events, in who it sees as its heroes.
Joan D. Chittister
#80. If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it.
Joan D. Chittister
#81. Nothing weighs more heavily on age than time. Nothing has more meaning ... Now time becomes, with a kind of ruthless honesty, what it has always been: life's most precious commodity. The only difference is that, finally, we know it.
Joan D. Chittister
#82. I began to trust the questions themselves to lead me beyond answers to understanding, beyond practice to faith
Joan D. Chittister
#83. All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.
Joan D. Chittister
#84. 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
#85. Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.
Joan D. Chittister
#86. An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability.
Joan D. Chittister
#87. Persistence may not solve everything - at least in our lifetime - but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not.
Joan D. Chittister
#88. Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.
Joan D. Chittister
#89. 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
#90. No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don't get it.
Joan D. Chittister
#91. Life is not meant to be a burden. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a blessing to be celebrated.
Joan D. Chittister
#92. Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship ... It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.
Joan D. Chittister
#93. We are each called to go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again.
Joan D. Chittister
#94. To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not "coming." Heaven is here.
Joan D. Chittister
#95. Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.
Joan D. Chittister
#96. we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of light?
Joan D. Chittister
#97. Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.
Joan D. Chittister
#98. Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us.
Joan D. Chittister
#99. Old age tells us that we ourselves have failed often, have never really done anything completely right, have never truly been perfect - anad that is completely all right. We are who we are - and so is everyone else.
Joan D. Chittister
#100. Benedictine spirituality, after all,
is life lived to the hilt.
It is a life of concentration
on life's ordinary dimensions.
It is an attempt to do
the ordinary things of life
extraordinarily well.
Joan D. Chittister
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