78 Quotes by Edith Stein

To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels – this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.

Appropriate environmental influences can prevent mistakes. The soul of a child is soft and impressionable. Whatever influence enters there can easily form it for a lifetime. When the facts of salvation history are introduced in early childhood and in an appropriate form, this may easily lay a foundation for a saintly life.

At first, after her conversion she thought she would have to renounce all that was secular and live totally immersed in God, but then she realized that, even in the contemplative life, you cannot sever all connection with the world, that the deeper you are drawn into God, the more you must go out of yourself to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.

You can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief, in the power of the cross. Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart. Its precious blood is poured everywhere, soothing, healing, saving.

All those who seek truth, seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.

If the mystery of the cross becomes the inner form of this science, a living energy that allows the soul to be molded by what is received from this mystery, it turns into a science of the cross. On the contrary, excessive interior preoccupation with one’s own personal concerns can develop in the course of life into a general indifference to things religious.

At some point we must plunge in to discover a greater expanse; yet when this broader horizon does appear, a new depth will open up at our point of entry.

Once while Edith was visiting the cathedral of Frankfurt, a woman with a market basket entered and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to her, leaving as deep an impression as the university lectures.

The nation... doesn't simply need what we have. It needs what we are.