Religious Life Quotes

“By definition, a 'Sisterchick' is a 'friend who shares the deepest wonders of your heart, loves you like a sister, and gives you a reality check when you're being a brat.”
― Robin Jones Gunn, Take Flight!: A Sisterchicks Devotional

“And here am I, she thought, fixed in the religious life like a candle on a spike. I consume, I burn away, always lighting the same corner, always beleaguered by the same shadows; and in the end I shall burn out and another candle will be fixed in my stead.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

“For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. _Just taking our time_, as we say. That is, letting time take us.

"Can you say," I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from teh age of nineteen in her monastery cell, "what the core of contemplative life is?"

"Leisure," she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, "Prayer." Or maybe "The search for God." Or "Inner peace." Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.

She saw I didn't see.

"It takes time to do this," she said finally.

Her "this" being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers.”
― Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime

“You get healthy by playing sports, not by screaming at the television. Likewise, you become divine by practicing religion, not by yelling scripture. And how do you practice religion? By loving your neighbor, instead of asking for some identification to authenticate that they are white, straight and catholic americans.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was

“Where religious doctrines exist, for example, they can only become real to the extent that there exist concrete semiotic practices by which they can be enacted, embodied, experienced, and transmitted. But those practices will be subject to such factors as logistics, aesthetics, economics, or prior history, that are independent of the logical, political, or emotional demands of and constraints on doctrine itself. [...] Even textual forms as relatively autonomous, portable, and durable as written scriptures depend for their persistence and power on social dynamics surrounding contextualization and entextualization.”
― Webb Keane

“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you…. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace”
― St. Augustine

“Mekâna üflenmiş kısacık bir zamandır insan. Bilmez ki kaç nefeslik...”
― Ayşe Şener, Anlamın İzinde

“I continue to grapple to find new terminology for talking about the religious life. Each age needs its own language for understanding enduring truths, and while many people feel uncomfortable talking about religion, our ego-centered, so-called real life is disintegrating at this point in history. The ancient world didn’t have much of what we call reality; they lived, instead, by the slender threads. We have gained ego reality but have lost the mystical and religious functions that should guide our lives.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations

“Kindness alone is the sign of a religious person.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

“If we add to the foregoing the counsels of enlightened directors and the wise admonitions of Superiors, we must conclude that the religious state offers, in abundance, all means necessary for perfection.”
― Fr Francis Xavier Lasance

“[Bernard Lichtenberg. 27.09.1943] It is my firm resolution to keep, with the help of God, the vows that in his presence I made at the end of the thirty-day spiritual exercises. That is to say, I shall consider everything that happens to me, joyful or painful things, elevating or depressing, in the light of eternity. In my pacience, I will possess my soul.”
― Helmut Gollwitzer, Dying We Live: The Final Messages and Records of the Resistance