Top 100 Chittister Quotes
#1. Stability of heart - commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God - is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. When
Joan D. Chittister
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues.
Joan D. Chittister
#7. 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
#8. life is the vessel we have been given in order to find out what life is really meant to be about.
Joan D. Chittister
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. We must learn to pray out of our weaknesses so that God can become our
strength.
Joan D. Chittister
#12. It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.
Joan D. Chittister
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
Joan D. Chittister
#17. Was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms.
Joan D. Chittister
#18. We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.'
Joan D. Chittister
#19. Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.
Joan D. Chittister
#20. 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
#21. "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
#22. A hard heart makes for hard judgments; a compassionate heart understands the humanity of the one we presume to judge.
Joan D. Chittister
#23. 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
#24. Precisely because of the greatness of God, we don't have to be great at all. Just in awe.
Joan D. Chittister
#25. Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.
Joan D. Chittister
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.
Joan D. Chittister
#32. 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
#33. Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.
Joan D. Chittister
#34. The question is not, do we go to church; the question is, have we been converted. The crux of Christianity is not whether or not we give donations to popular charities but whether or not we are really committed to the poor.
Joan D. Chittister
#35. preoccupation with fantasies of success; exhibitionism and insatiable attention-getting maneuvers;
Joan D. Chittister
#37. We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been.
Joan D. Chittister
#38. When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have.
Joan D. Chittister
#39. 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
#40. LIKE A GREAT WATERWHEEL, THE LITURGICAL YEAR goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime.
Joan D. Chittister
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.
Joan D. Chittister
#49. 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
#50. Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often - in some instances for our lifetime - before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy.
Joan D. Chittister
#51. Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.
Joan D. Chittister
#52. The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.
Joan D. Chittister
#53. 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
#54. The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more.
Joan D. Chittister
#55. 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
#56. What happens to the spiritual life of a young girl who is made to understand, consciously or subconsciously, that she has no place in the spiritual domain except as a consumer of someone else's God?
Joan D. Chittister
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all.
Joan D. Chittister
#62. Hope is what sits by the window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn't an ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possible come.
Joan D. Chittister
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves ... Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world.
Joan D. Chittister
#68. 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
#69. There is no amount of darkness that can extinguish the inner light. The important thing is not to spend our lives trying to control the environment around us. The task is to control the environment within us.
Joan D. Chittister
#71. 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
#72. Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?
Joan D. Chittister
#73. Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.
Joan D. Chittister
#74. Imagine how happy, how holy, life would be if we ever really learn to see beauty.
Joan D. Chittister
#75. If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.
Joan D. Chittister
#76. 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
#77. Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.
Joan D. Chittister
#78. 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
#79. Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that's in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.
Joan D. Chittister
#80. 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
#81. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. We cannot expect life to be perfect. But we can expect to see life come from death. We can expect to see morning after night. We can expect that acceptance of the struggle will give rise to the victory over self.
Joan D. Chittister
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life.
Joan D. Chittister
#91. We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.
Joan D. Chittister
#92. Holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.
Joan D. Chittister
#93. Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what y ou are expecting in life.
Joan D. Chittister
#96. We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn't prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It's what's inside of us, not what's outside of us that counts.
Joan D. Chittister
#97. Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long.
Joan D. Chittister
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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