Grace, Page: Quotes, Quote Topic
When we consider the properties of fire, we realize that it is an accurate description of grace. Fire has brightness in appearance, warmness of effect, quickness of movement. In the same way, grace shines because of knowledge, warms through love, enkindles –and moves as a result of prayerfulness. Grace shines because of the knowledge through which God provides light for our eyes and shows us the path stretching homewards… Grace warms through love. It is through love that God arouses our hearts… Grace stretches and moves upwards as a result of prayerfulness which lifts the heart towards higher aims… Without this fire, there is no life. Consequently everyone should exert himself in order to possess this.
–Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274)
Discipleship, Grace, Page: Quotes, Quote Topic, Spiritual (life)
For all that we are, and all that we have received, from without and from within, these are all the free gifts of God; for which we must thank and praise Him, and with which we must serve Him, if we are to please Him.
–Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381)
Grace, Page: Quotes, Quote Topic, Spiritual (life)
Now all holiness and all blessedness lie in this: that the spirit is led upwards, through likeness and by means of grace or glory, to rest in the essential unity. For the grace of God is the way by which we must always go, if we would enter into the naked essence in which God gives Himself with all His riches without means.
–Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381)
Abandonment (of self), Grace, Page: Quotes, Quote Topic
And in this inward-drawing touch, we feel that God wills us to be His; and therefore, we must renounce ourselves and leave Him to work our blessedness. But where He touches us by the outpouring touch, He leaves us to ourselves, and makes us free, and sets us in His Presence, and teaches us to pray in the spirit and to ask in freedom, and shows us His incomprehensible riches in such manifold ways as we are able to grasp.
–Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381)
Grace, Page: Quotes, Quote Topic
For God’s grace is made ready for all men, and awaits the conversion of every sinner, and whenever a sinner, urged by grace, renounces himself and will call upon God with faith, he finds pardon. And likewise, whosoever through grace with loving contentment turns towards the Eternal Contentment of God, he is enwrapped and embraced in the abysmal love which is God Himself. And thereby he is perpetually renewed in love and in the virtues; for, between our contentment in God and God’s contentment in us there abides an activity of love and of eternal life.
–Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381)
Discipleship, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), Page: Quotes, Quote Author, Struggle (with Sin)
To subdue the spirit is harder than to afflict the flesh
–Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)
