Quotes about Heart

Both the church's practice and its Platonic pronouncements create tragic gaps for any person with an operative head and a beating heart. But remember, even a little bit of God is well worth loving, and even a little bit of truth and love goes a long way.

I personally describe contemplation as "non-dual consciousness" and find that it is necessary to overcome the "stinking thinking" of most addicts, which tends to be "all-or-nothing thinking."3 We could say that authentic spirituality is invariably a matter of emptying the mind and filling the heart at the same time.

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart. —St. Francis of Assisi13

That is the rub of any conversion experience: We only realize how much we needed it when we are on the other side! That is why we need the tenacity of faith and hope to carry us across to most transformational experiences. When we can let others actually influence us and change us, our heart space is open.

To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we must have three spaces opened within us—and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the work of spirituality—and it is work.

Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart."5

Two thousand years after Jesus lived here, Christians still have a hard time accepting his upside-down world, in which we are expected to work for justice on behalf of others but not to demand or expect it for ourselves (Matthew 5:6,10-12). This is one of the hardest challenges of Jesus' message. It demands an expanded heart and mind.

Your heart needs to be broken—and broken open—at least once to discover what your heart means and to have a heart for others.

As when things are cold we bring them to the fire to heat and melt, so bring we our cold hearts to the fire of the love of Christ; consider we of our sins against Christ, and of Christ's love towards us; dwell upon this meditation. Think what great love Christ hath showed unto us, and how little we have deserved, and this will make our hearts to melt, and be as pliable as wax before the sun. Secondly

God is always more interested in why we do something than in what we do. Attitudes count more than achievements.

THE HEART OF WORSHIP IS SURRENDER.

You cannot keep yourself from talking about what you care about most. Jesus said, "A man's heart determines his speech.