Joan Chittister Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

Life is not meant to be a burden. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a blessing to be celebrated.

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That's a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.

Joan Chittister
There is no amount of darkness that can extinguish the inner light. The important thing is not to spend our lives trying to control the environment around us. The task is to control the environment within us.

Joan Chittister
We must learn to pray out of our weaknesses so that God can become our
strength.

Joan Chittister
Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.

Joan Chittister
Oppressors do not get to be oppressors in a single sweep. They manage it because little by little, we make them that. We overlook too much in the beginning and wonder why we lost control in the end.

Joan Chittister
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.

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth.

Joan Chittister
In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life.

Joan Chittister
We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.

Joan 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.

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

Joan Chittister
Life is an exercise in the development of feeling. When we repress feelings, we become sour and judgmental. When we live awash in great feeling over small things, we become jaded long before we have even begun to enjoy. When feelings are in balance they sweeten long days and great distances with gratitude and hope.

Joan 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.

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.

Joan Chittister
It is not our job to work miracles, but it is our task to try.

Joan 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.

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

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
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 Chittister
Prayer can be an easy substitute for real spirituality. It would be impossible to have spirituality without prayer, of course, but it is certainly possible to pray without having a spirituality at all. How do you know? 'Am I becoming kinder?' is a good place to start.

Joan 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.

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

Joan Chittister