Best 140 quotes of Joan D. Chittister on MyQuotes

Joan D. Chittister

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    Joan D. Chittister

    A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship. . . .It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    A hard heart makes for hard judgments; a compassionate heart understands the humanity of the one we presume to judge.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    A seeker searched for years to know the secret of achievement and success in human life. One night in a dream a sage appeared bearing the answer to the secret. The sage said simply: "Stretch out your hand and reach what you can." "No, it can't be that simple," the seeker said. And the sage said softly, "You are right, it is something harder. It is this: Stretch out your hand and reach what you cannot." Now that's vision.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Compassion for the other comes out of our ability to accept ourselves. Until we realize both our own weaknesses and our own privileges, we can never tolerate lack of status and depth of weakness in the other.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us, as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then, of course, something must be done. Nothing stays the same once we have found the God within…. We carry the world in our hearts: the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the Earth, the hunger of the starving, the joy of every laughing child.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Don't worry about wearing the sign; be the sign. You don't have to wear a sandwich board saying, "I am religious and spiritual and know what you should do." You do have to be the best of the mystical presence that your tradition brings. Certainly in Christianity, that means that you begin to go through life putting on the mind of Jesus, trying to see the world as Jesus saw the world.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    faith isn't faith until it's all we have to hold on to and knowledge fails us. When we pray for faith, we automatically pray for darkness. Think about it.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Feminism without spirituality runs the risk of becoming what it rejects: an elitist ideology, arrogant, superficial and separatist, closed to everything but itself. Without a spiritual base that obligates it beyond itself, calls it out of itself for the sake of others, a pedagogical feminism turned in on itself can become just one more intellectual ghetto that the world doesn’t notice and doesn’t need.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Freedom, in childhood, may be the right to be totally self-centered. … But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Getting to know ourselves and learning to control ourselves are the two great tasks of life. Don't make up strange and exotic 'penances.' Simply say no to yourself once a day, and you will be on the road to sanctity for the rest of your life.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves. . . . Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Happiness does not come quickly. It is not conferred by any single event, however exciting or comforting or satisfying the event may be. It cannot be purchased, whatever the allure of the next, the newest, the brightest, the best. Happiness, like Carl Sandburg's fog, "comes on little cat feet," often silently, often without our knowing it, too often without our noticing.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Hope is what sits by the window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn't an ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possible come.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Hospitality is simply love on the loose.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and our efforts. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves. It is the first step towards dismantling the barriers of the world. Hospitality is the way we turn a prejudiced world around, one heart at a time.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Humor and laughter are not necessarily the same thing. Humor permits us to see into life from a fresh and gracious perspective. We learn to take ourselves more lightly in the presence of good humor. Humor gives us the strength to bear what cannot be changed, and the sight to see the human under the pompous.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    I begin to understand as never before that holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    "Ideals are like stars," Carl Schurz wrote. "You will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like seafarers on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny." Ideals do not determine what we do to make a living in life; They govern what we become as we do it.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    I have to be honest with you, it never occurred to me, as years went by, that my country would look like this as I grew into it, and as it grew into a different world. That's why I keep pressing the notion that we must seek wisdom.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Imagination begins when it' s raining too hard to go out and play and you become really absorbed in something you would never have thought of doing had the sun come out as usual. In which case, thank God for the rain.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    Imagine how happy, how holy, life would be if we ever really learn to see beauty.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    In Benedictine spirituality, work is what we do to continue what God wanted done....God goes on creating through us. Consequently a life spent serving God must be a life spent giving to others what we have been given.

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    Joan D. Chittister

    In community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another and to ourselves...In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of GOD; it is another thing to practice it