128 Quotes by Joan D. Chittister

When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have.

Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.

When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life.

June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.

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.

The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.

We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.

We should employ our passions in the service of life,” Sir Richard Steele wrote, “not spend life in the service of our passions.