Examine yourself to see whether you have within you a strong sense of your own self importance, or negatively, whether you have failed to realize that you are nothing. This feeling of self-importance is deeply hidden, but it controls the whole of our life. Its first demand is that everything should be as we wish it, and as soon as this is not so we complain to God and are annoyed with people.
–Saint Theophane the Recluse (1815-1894)
You are one with Jesus as the members are one with the head, so you must have with him one spirit, one soul, one life, one will, one intention, one heart. It is he himself who is to be spirit, heart, love, life, everything for you. In the life of a Christian all these marvels have their origin in baptism, are increased and strengthened by confirmation and the good use of the other graces in which God makes him share, and are perfected above all by the holy Eucharist.
–Saint John Eudes (1601-1689)
God is so good that he never ceases to work in our hearts to draw us out of ourselves, out of vain and perishable things, so that we can receive his grace and give ourselves wholly to him.
–Saint Jane Frances de Chantal (1572-1641)
All I want is that we should know and abide with the Person with Whom we are speaking, and not turn our backs upon Him; for that, it seems to me, is what we are doing when we talk to God and yet think of all kinds of vanity. The whole mischief comes from our not really grasping the fact that He is near us, and imagining Him far away — so far, that we shall have to go to Heaven in order to find Him.
–Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
People cannot become perfect by dint of hearing or reading about perfection. The chief thing is not to listen to yourself, but silently to listen to God. Talk little and do much, without caring to be seen. God will teach you more than all the most experienced persons or the most spiritual books can do. You already know a great deal more than you practice. You do not need the acquirement of fresh knowledge half so much as to put in practice that which you already possess.
–François Fénèlon (1651-1715)
Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.
–Blessed Fulton Sheen (1895-1979)
