Robert Sarah > Quotes

“Words often bring with them the illusion of transparency, as though they allowed us to understand everything, control everything, put everything in order. Modernity is talkative because it is proud, unless the converse is true. Is our incessant talking perhaps what makes us proud?”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“Sounds and emotions detach us from ourselves, whereas silence always forces man to reflect upon his own life.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“Christ lived for thirty years in silence. Then, during his public life, he withdrew to the desert to listen to and speak with his Father. The world vitally needs those who go off into the desert. Because God speaks in silence.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“A Godless society, which considers any spiritual questions a dead letter, masks the emptiness of its materialism by killing time so as better to forget eternity.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“The real men of God have no fear of death, because they are waiting for heaven.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“We need priests who are men of the interior life, “God’s watchmen” and pastors passionately committed to the evangelization of the world, and not social workers or politicians.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. 75. Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“Through silence, we return to our heavenly origin, where there is nothing but calm, peace, repose, silent contemplation, and adoration of the radiant face of God.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“Unfortunately, it is easier to destroy a country than to rebuild it.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“In our materialistic civilization, man thinks almost exclusively of his own narrow interests. He sees God as the one who ought to provide him with what consumption does not give him. God is utilized to satisfy selfish demands. If he does not answer prayer, they abandon him. Some even go so far as to blaspheme his holy name. The religion that ought to connect heaven and earth then runs the risk of becoming a purely narcissistic space.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Today all our freedoms are threatened. Economic, political, and media pressures never cease to diminish the connection between liberty and truth.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“The most important moments in life are the hours of prayer and adoration. They give birth to a human being, fashion our true identity; they root our existence in mystery.”
― Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“Soviet Communism showed how possible it was to lead mankind into misery while promising absolute equality.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“The word is not just a sound; it is a person and a presence. God is the eternal Word, the Logos.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“The greatest things are accomplished in silence—not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“Relativism is a widespread evil, and it is not easy to combat it. The task becomes more complex inasmuch as it arbitrarily serves as a sort of charter for a way of communal life. Relativism attempts to complete the process of the social disappearance of God. It guides mankind with an attractive logic that proves to be a perverse totalitarian system.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“God is still calling as many men as in the past; it is the men whose hearing is not what it used to be.”
― Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“I asked the earth and it answered, “I am not He”; and all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things, and they answered, “We are not your God, seek higher.” I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it answered, “Anaximenes was wrong; I am not God.” I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered, “Neither are we God whom you seek.” And I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: “Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.” And they cried out in a great voice: “He made us.” My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty.

Man is a silent, incarnate word of God. The moon, the stars, the sun, the sea, the firmament are the visible proof of the existence and omnipotence of God, who created them out of sheer love. These creatures are the powerful, mysterious voice of God.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah

“A few sentences are enough to tell the truth.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“If man claims to adapt the liturgy to his era, to transform it to suit the circumstances, divine worship dies. The development of some liturgical symbols is necessary sometimes; however, if man goes so far as to confuse the temporal and the eternal, he turns his back on the essential justification for the liturgy.”
― Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“Saint John of the Cross exhorts us to be constantly in prayer and adoration in the presence of God, so as to arm ourselves against activism, especially of the ideological sort, which produces nothing lasting that can raise us up to God. He wrote in his Spiritual Canticle: “Let those, then, who are singularly active, who think they can win the world with their preaching and exterior works, observe here that they would profit the Church and please God much more, not to mention the good example they would give, were they to spend at least half of this time with God in prayer, even though they may not have reached a prayer as sublime as this. They would then certainly accomplish more, with less labor, by one work than they otherwise would by a thousand. For their prayer they would merit this result, and themselves be spiritually strengthened. Without prayer, they would do a great deal of hammering but accomplish little, and sometimes nothing, and even at times cause harm.”4”
― Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“It is necessary to protect precious silence from all parasitical noise. The noise of our “ego”, which never stops claiming its rights, plunging us into an excessive preoccupation with ourselves. The noise of our memory, which draws us toward the past, that of our recollections or of our sins. The noise of temptations or of acedia, the spirit of gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sadness, vanity, pride—in short: everything that makes up the spiritual combat that man must wage every day. In order to silence these parasitical noises, in order to consume everything in the sweet flame of the Holy Spirit, silence is the supreme antidote.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“Man controls his hours of activity if he knows how to enter into silence. The life of silence must be able to precede the active life.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“While Christians are dying for their faith and their fidelity to Jesus, in the West, men of the Church are trying to reduce the requirements of the Gospel to a minimum. We”
― Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“Many fervent Christians who are moved by the Passion and death of Christ on the Cross no longer have the strength to weep or to utter a cry of pain to the priests and bishops who make their appearance as entertainers and set themselves up as the main protagonists of the Eucharist. These believers tell us nevertheless: "We do not want to gather with men around a man! We want to see Jesus! Show him to us in the silence and humility of your prayer!”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“The silence of the crib, the silence of Nazareth, the silence of the Cross, and the silence of the sealed tomb are one. The silences of Jesus are silences of poverty, humility, self-sacrifice, and abasement; it is the bottomless abyss of his kenosis, his self-emptying (Phil 2:7).”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“In your opinion, what would be the best way of summarizing the long pontificate of John Paul II? All those very productive years can be traced back to the three pillars of his interior life, which were the Cross, the Eucharist, and the Blessed Virgin, Crux, Hostia, et Virgo. His extraordinary faith sought the foundations for its strength only in the most ordinary tools of the Christian life. Before”
― Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith

“Why are men so noisy during the liturgies while Christ's prayer was silent? The words of the Son of God come from the heart, and the heart is silent. Why do we not know how to speak with a silent heart? The heart of Jesus does not speak. It radiates with love because its language comes from the divine depths.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

“Without noise, postmodern man falls into a dull, insistent uneasiness. He is accustomed to permanent background noise, which sickens yet reassures him.”
― Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise