Thomas Dubay > Quotes

“The humble listen to their brothers and sisters because they assume they have something to learn. They are open to correction, and they become wiser through it.”
― Fr. Thomas Dubay

“The humble person is open to being corrected, whereas the arrogant is clearly closed to it. Proud people are supremely confident in their own opinions and insights. No one can admonish them successfully: not a peer, not a local superior, not even the pope himself. They know - and that is the end of the matter. Filled as they are with their own views, the arrogant lack the capacity to see another view.”
― Fr. Thomas Dubay

“The acute experience of great beauty readily evokes a nameless yearning for something more than earth can offer. Elegant splendor reawakens our spirit’s aching need for the infinite, a hunger for more than matter can provide.”
― Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet

“Wonder at reality demands the humility to sit at the foot of a dandelion. The proud are so full of themselves that there is little room to marvel at anything else.”
― Thomas Dubay

“Mediocre people often have a tinge of religion about them, but it is only a tinge. They take their religion as it comes. They may pray and worship more or less regularly, and they usually stay clear of publicly disgraceful crimes, but they are lukewarm, colorless. Seldom or never do they read a serious book about prayer or study to learn more about God and His plans, to discover how to be humble and chaste and patient. They are always too busy for the one thing necessary.”
― Thomas Dubay, Seeking Spiritual Direction: How to Grow the Divine Life Within

“Though Jesus was in torture on the cross, He thought of praying for His persecutors, of caring for His mother, of securing the good thief's salvation.”
― Thomas Dubay, Seeking Spiritual Direction: How to Grow the Divine Life Within

“Beauty is necessarily shrouded in mystery--which is part of its splendour.”
― thomas dubay

“The whole aim of any person who is beginning prayer—and don’t forget this, because it is very important—should be that he work and prepare himself with determination and every effort to bring his will into conformity with God’s will.”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.” —Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate in physics”
― Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet

“in everything we do in this life we are making ourselves the kind of persons we shall be for all eternity: loving or hateful, egocentric or outgoing, fulfilled or frustrated, beautiful or ugly, ecstatically delighted or utterly miserable.”
― Thomas Dubay, Deep Conversion/Deep Prayer

“A man in trouble laments that he did not listen to his teachers, and thus he finds himself in a sad state, utter ruin. A candid admission of a blunder is refreshing and not often heard in human affairs. It is the saint alone who is large-minded enough to think and speak in this way. This is part of his authenticity.

The person who is swift to hear and slow to respond is a stranger to an all-knowing illuminism. He believes that others, too, have some truth, and he is willing to be instructed by them. He is ready for the mind of God.”
― Fr. Thomas Dubay

“If a person wishes to gain freedom of spirit and not be always troubled, let him begin by not being frightened by the cross, and he will see how the Lord also helps him carry it and he will gain satisfaction and profit from everything.36”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“Being in love with God is never boring.15”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“The value of negative things derives, must derive, from something positive, something they make possible.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Living things grow gradually, and communion with God, being the supreme of all living realities, likewise matures imperceptibly,”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“We human beings are moved by music as no other animal is. Stranger still, it moves us rational animals apart from whether we can play it, read it, or even much understand it. Music reaches the passions without passing through the mind. Although some music calls forth enormous, in truth, life-long diligence from those who play it, those who have devoted no study whatever to listening to it are moved by it. As a consequence music is unique among human pursuits in being able to overcome the vast gulf between rare virtue and common aptitude. It is the most mathematical of the fine arts. It is science and fun together.19”
― Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet

“The worldling will not face his colossal inner blah.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“If we are to love someone completely, there can be no room for a competing love.”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“I say that had you asked about meditation I could have spoken about it and counseled all to practice it. . . . But contemplation is something else. . . . This King doesn’t give Himself but to those who give themselves entirely to Him.”4”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“Liberty is a gift and power that extends even to the determination of our eternal and self-chosen destiny. This is one reason a single person is of greater worth than the whole of the subhuman cosmos.”
― Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet

“The worldling will not face his colossal inner blah. He multiplies experiences in an unending and desperate attempt to numb his spirit. It hurts so much not to have attained the very reason for his existence, an immersion in God, that he uses things as a narcotic. The worldling pursues prestige or comfort or wealth or sexual encounters not because they basically satisfy him (if they did, once would be enough) but because they dull his inner aching. Always and eventually he is faced with his personal failure. But the sight if it is so revolting and painful, he dives once again into the aspirin sea of frantic pursuits.”
― Thomas Dubay

“Diffident people often do not find it difficult to acquiesce to another’s decisions either because they are reluctant to assume responsibility for important decisions or because they fear failure and criticism.”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“Even among spiritually earnest men and women only a few get beyond the first purification, because they do not persevere “in treading this narrow road that leads to life”.17 These are people who never bring themselves to give up worldly values entirely. They cut corners on time given to prayer; they engage in gossip, unkind and idle words; they live comfortably themselves and do not share much with the poor; they allow themselves minor disobediences as well as the more serious rejection of magisterial teaching; they indulge in worldly amusements and expensive tastes in dining, drinking, clothing and vacations.”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“Because [virginity] designates a primal, unspoiled, total readiness for one Beloved, there is no reason why we should allow the secular mind to co-opt a beautiful reality, reduce it to a physical condition, and then proceeded to denigrate what it does not understand.”
― Thomas Dubay, And You Are Christ's: The Charism of Virginity and the Celibate Life

“Down in the human spirit there is a center that opens on to infinity... Our deepest hungers are not for food and drink, not for amusements and recreations, not for property and wardrobes, not for notoriety and gossip. We hunger for truth, we thirst to drink beauty, we yearn to celebrate, we seek to delight, we stretch out to love and be loved. That is why anything less than everything is not enough.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Depth of communion with the indwelling Trinity occurs only in a person intent on living the Gospel totally, one who is humble and patient, temperate and obedient, pure and kind, free of selfish clingings.”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“The one who knows much about anything knows far better than the uneducated how much he does not know about it.”
― Thomas Dubay, Prayer Primer: Igniting a Fire Within

“The main problem in developing a deep prayer life is by far the failure to live the radicality of the Gospel, hour by hour and day by day.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Contemplation and self-indulgence do not mix.”
― Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel on Prayer

“There is something ill about a person who makes a surrender of the great human good of married love and then fixes his heart on mere things. Or to put the same idea a bit differently, it is abnormal to give up a dearly loved human person and then attach one’s heart to subpersons. A healthy man or woman gives up married love only because he has found another and greater love.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom