Quote

Memory is not about what went on in the past, it is about what is going on inside us right this moment. … It is made up of the stuff of life in the process of becoming the grist of the soul.

Joan D. Chittister

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joan D. Chittister
Stuff
Grist
Moments
Memory
Past
Becoming
Soul
Inside
Right
Memories
Going
Went
Made
Moment
Life
Process

More quotes by Joan D. Chittister

Image
The question is not, do we go to church the question is, have we been converted. The crux of Christianity is not whether or not we give donations to popular charities but whether or not we are really committed to the poor.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
Life is a thing of many stages and moving parts. What we do with ease at one time of life we can hardly manage at another. What we could not fathom doing when we were young, we find great joy in when we are old. Like the seasons through which we move, life itself is a never-ending series of harvests, a different fruit for every time.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
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.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is
Joan D. Chittister
Image
To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
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.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the kings acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
When I get on the internet and hide behind a false identity, and then allow that hiding to free me from the standards of decency, to begin to use language I would never use in front of my mother, all of a sudden, there's nothing between me and you, but worse than that, there's nothing between me and my worst self.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
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.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
It's possible to have too much in life. Too many clothes jade our appreciation of new ones too much money can out us out of touch with life too much free time and dull the edge of the soul. We need sometimes to come very near the bone so tha we can taste the marrow of life, rather than its superfluities.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
The liturgical year is the year that sets out to attune the life of the Christian to the life of Jesus, the Christ. It proposes, year after year, to immerse us over and over again into the sense and substance of the Christian life until, eventually we become what we say we are - followers of Jesus all the way to the heart of God
Joan D. Chittister
Image
Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. It is the strange knock at the door, the sudden sight of an unceremoniously blooming flower, an afternoon in the yard, a day of riding the midtown bus. Just to see. Just to notice. Just to be there.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
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.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.
Joan D. Chittister
Image
If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.
Joan D. Chittister