Quotes about Life

You will consume much more grace by leading a holy life than you will by sinning, because every holy act you do will have to be upheld by the grace of God.

Full participation in the life of God's Kingdom and in the vivid companionship of Christ comes to us only through appropriate exercise in the disciplines for life in the spirit. Those disciplines alone can become for average Christians the conditions upon which the spiritual life is made indubitably real.

Knowledge is the basis of belief, and, when it is, it gives the belief a very different bearing upon life.

What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ from a life that is one with his resurrected reality day by day, learning obedience through inward transformation.

Now, as St. Augustine saw long ago, the opposite of love is pride. Love eliminates pride because its will for the good of the other nullifies our arrogant presumption that we should get our way. We are concerned for the good of others and assured that our good is taken care of without self-will. Thus pride and fear and their dreadful offspring no longer rule our life as love becomes completed in us.

The Bible is, after all, God's gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading—that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy—is what it requires to direct us into life in God's kingdom.

That is the function of the will or heart: to organize our life as a whole, and, indeed, to organize it around God.

The problem comes when we mistake the vessel for the treasure, for the treasure is the life and power of Jesus Christ.

They bring the life of the kingdom to other people. They bring that life in themselves. That's what Jesus himself said, and that's what he did. When he came, he said, "Repent for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand." What was at hand? The kingdom that was in him. As people looked at him and listened to him, they realized that the kingdom of God was there and that it was available to them, and they became disciples of Jesus because of that.

Heroism, generally, is totally out of place in the spiritual life, until we grow to the point at which it would never be thought of as heroism anyway.

I believe one reason why so many people do in fact fail to immerse themselves in the words of the New Testament, and neglect or even avoid them, is that the life they see there is so unlike what they know from their own experience.

He teaches us how to be in prayer what we are in life and how to be in life what we are in prayer.