Catherine Nagle > Catherine's Quotes

“My hope is that after you read Imprinted Wisdom, you will be able to see your blessings, to count more of them that you already have. Realize your thoughts touch holy ground. Action with compassion for others will heal all your sorrow. And prayer will lift your veil of tears. Give more of everything than you take. Know that the true spirit of God lies within your heart.”
― Catherine Nagle, Imprinted Wisdom

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
― Aristotle

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

“She knew with painful certainty that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference.”
― Susan Wiggs, Summer by the Sea

“I KNOW THE WAY YOU CAN GET

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one's self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.

I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love's
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering God,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love!”
― Hafiz

“It is written on the gate of heaven: Nothing in existence is more powerful than destiny. And destiny brought you here, to this page, which is part of your ticket-as all things are-to return to God.”
― Hafiz, A Year with Hafiz: Daily Contemplations

“TRIPPING OVER JOY

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?

The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, “I Surrender!”

Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.”
― Hafez, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy

“Whatis the root of all these words?
One thing: Love.
But a love so deep and sweet it needed to express itself with scents, sounds, colors that never before existed.”
― Hafiz, The Gift

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“Turn your wounds into wisdom.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.”
― Meister Eckhart

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.”
― Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.”
― Joyce Meyer, Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind

“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“Yet I have come to believe that while the past is unchangeable, our perceptions of is are malleable...”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding

“Fret not, my son. None of us is perfect. It is better to have crooked legs than a crooked spirit. We can only do the best we can with what we have. That, after all, is the measure of success: what we do with what we have.”
― Marguerite DeAngeli, The Door in the Wall

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.”
― Phillips Brooks