Quotes about Experience

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living.

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.

Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.

Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.

We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!

A saint is not someone who is good but someone who experiences the goodness of God.

We do not see God in contemplation - we know Him by love: for his pure love and when we taste the experience of loving God for his own sake alone, we know by experience who and what he is.

Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis but first of all by living.

Suppose that my poverty be a secret hunger for spiritual riches: suppose that by pretending to empty myself, pretending to be silent, I am really trying to cajole God into enriching me with some experience--what then? Then everything becomes a distraction.

The first step in identifying "heresy" is to refuse all identifications with the subjective intuitions and experience of the "heretic," and to see his words only in an impersonal realm in which there is no dialogue - in which dialogue is denied a priori .