Quotes on Inspiration

If we are Christians, we must look like Christ - this is my deep conviction.

There are very few real teachers. Teaching is not a job; it is a vocation. To be a great one many qualities must be combined: love of truth, knowledge, reverence, loving concern for one's students, clarity and patience.

The modern world, a world which has experienced marvelous achievements but which seems to have lost its sense of ultimate realities and of existence itself.

God came into the world to reawaken the thirst for great things in us.

How can it be that the most wonderous and sacred human space - the womb - has become a place of unutterable violence?

Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation... of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.

God loves us; we need only to summon up the humility to allow ourselves to be loved.

The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

Music, great music, distends the spirit, arouses profound emotions and almost naturally invites us to raise our minds and hearts to God in all situations of human existence, the joyful and the sad. Music can become prayer.

It is much easier to conquer a country than to conquer ourselves.

Only if there is love, if hearts are opened, can one person truly know the other.

Place your mind before the mirror of eternity! Place your soul in the brilliance of glory! And transform your entire being into the image of the Godhead Itself through contemplation.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

Violence against even one human being is violence against all.

The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.

The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.

Believe the incredible and you can do the impossible.

The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully. The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter.

Man must reconcile himself to his natural greatness.... he must not forget that he is a person.

Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body.

Our first experience of God is so important, we either experience Him as the police guard that wants to punish or as Creative Love that awaits.