Joan Chittister Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often—in some instances for our lifetime—before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the effort to overcome that is holy-making.

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

Joan 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.

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

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

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
The vision of a culture lies in what becomes its major institutions, in what it remembers as its most impacting events, in who it sees as its heroes.

Joan Chittister
"When we do not know what harbor we are making for," the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, "no wind is the right wind." Persons have vision only when they have a dream that drives them on.

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
My limitations make space for the gifts of other people. Without the grace of our limitations we would be isolated, dry, and insufferable creatures indeed.

Joan 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.

Joan Chittister
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 Chittister
Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. "Success is dangerous," the painter Pablo Picasso said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

Joan Chittister
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.

Joan Chittister