Make ready for the Christ, Whose smile, like lightning, sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps, in your paper flesh, like dynamite.
—Thomas Merton

I never spoke with God, / Nor visited in heaven; / Yet certain am I of the spot / As if the chart were given.
—Emily Dickinson

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow and to love him as they love their cow—they love their cow for the milk and the cheese and the profit it makes them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort.
—Meister Eckhart

 Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light. 
—Madeline L’Engle

Have you run so many circles of the years bustling vainly about the world, and yet you don’t have 40 days to be free for prayer for your own soul’s sake?
—Saint Cyril of Jerusalem

I have been my own disciple and my own master. And I have been a good disciple but a bad master.
—Antonio Porchia

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot teach a person anything.  You can only help him discover it within himself.
—Galileo Galilei

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.
—Robert Frost 

A teacher is not served by a student who does not surpass the teacher.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Without confidence and love, there can be no true education. If you want to be love you must love yourselves, and make your children feel that you love them.
—Saint John Bosco

The highest wisdom is kindness.
—The Talmud

Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness, or else forgiving another.
—Jean Paul Richter

Mercy is the image of God, and the merciful are, in fact, a God dwelling on the Earth. As God is merciful to all, without distinction, so the merciful must share benefits equally.
—Rabban Youssef Bousnaya, 10th-century Syrian monk

We need to understand our exploration is not an effort to get anywhere. My starting point is that we’re already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.
—Richard Rohr, O.F.M

The one who trusts in themselves is lost. The one who trusts in God can do all things.
—Saint Alphonsus Liguori

Difficult times are the most providential and the most evangelical, and . . . it is necessary to live in the contemplation and serenity of the cross.
—Cardinal Eduardo Pironio

The responsible person seeks to make his or her whole life a response to the question and call of God.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Today we still cast the net. And Christ fills it. And Christ calls to conversion those who are found . . . among the waves and tempests of the world.
—Cyril of Alexandria

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
—Joseph Campbell

I have found my place in the church, and this place, O my God, you have given me. In the heart of the church, my mother, I will be love.
—Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

When the Son of Man went into the place where he belonged, his own people did not receive him. The “patriotism” of this elected people should have consisted in faith in God and in his word, and therefore also in his new word, but the incarnate Word did not encounter faith.
—Karl Rahner

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
—André Gide

Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.
—Proverbs 25:25

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.
—Plato

In the parlance of John’s gospel, his hour was the time of the crucifixion. In that hour Jesus would take his own bride and his glory would be fully revealed. For now, out in Cana, the disciples and Jesus’ mother saw and tasted a new, fine wine that would revive a failing feast. Glorious though it was, however, it was only the beginning.
—Frederick Niedner

When Christ changed the water into wine by his power, the crowd rejoiced . . . . Today, it is at the banquet of the church that we are all seated, for the wine is changed into the blood of Christ, and we drink it with blessed joy, glorifying the great bridegroom.
—Romanus, fif^th-century musician

When Israel crossed the Red Sea, the angels were about to break forth in song, but the Holy One rebuked them, “My children are drowning, and you would sing?”
—The Talmud

Peoples of every nation, come and receive the immortality given in Baptism. . . . Do you wish to know how to do this? By water and the Holy Spirit. This is to say, by the water through which we are born again and given life, and by the Spirit who is the Comforter sent for your sake to make you a child of God.
—Third-century homily

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
—Rabindranath Tagore

 In Baptism the form of Christ’s death is impressed upon [one’s] own. . . . Anybody living in the strength of Christ’s Baptism lives in the strength of Christ’s death.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness.
—Pope Saint John Paul II