Quotes about Reflection

St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it.

The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary everyday routine.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen.

When a hideous man becomes a father And a son is born to him In the middle of the night He trembles and lights a lamp And runs to look in anguish On that child's face To see whom he resembles.

I should be able to return to solitude each time as to the place I have never described to anybody, as the place which I have never brought anyone to see, as the place whose silence has mothered an interior life known to no one but God alone.

Therefore beware of the contemplative who says that theology is all straw before he has ever bothered to read any.

There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible...

Man is the image of God, and his inner self is a kind of mirror in which God not only sees Himself, but reveals Himself to the "mirror" in which He is reflected.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

St. Eucherius on that sunrise! "Think how much more the splendor of the light will be for us in the future, if it shines upon us so brilliantly now. In what magnificent form will the light shine on eternal things, when it shines so beautifully now on what is passing away!

But in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They "die" to be born again on a higher level of life.

But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him.