A spiritual life, without a very large allowance of disquietude in it, is no spiritual life at all. It is but a flattering superstition of self-love.
Deep theology is the best fuel of devotion; it readily catches fire, and once kindled it burns long.
We must have passed through life unobservantly, if we have never perceived that a man is very much himself what he thinks of others.
Eternity will not be long enough to learn all he is, or to praise him for all he has done, but then, that matters not; for we shall be always with him, and we desire nothing more.
For right is right, since God is God and right the day must win. To doubt would be disloyalty, to falter would be sin.
God always fills in all hearts all the room which is left Him there.
Love’s secret is always to be doing things for God, and not to mind because they are such very little ones.
Kind words produce happiness. How often have we ourselves been made happy by kind words, in a manner and to an extent which we are unable to explain!
Happiness is a great power of holiness. Thus, kind words, by their power of producing happiness, have also a power of producing holiness, and so of winning men to God.
The buried talent is the sunken rock on which most lives strike and founder.
They always win who side with God.
For children is there any happiness which is not also noise?
We can exaggerate about many things; but we can never exaggerate our obligation to Jesus, or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to an end of the sweet things that might be said of Him.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy Like the wideness of the sea Oratory Hymns.
If our love were but more simple, We should take Him at His word; And our lives would be all sunshine In the sweetness of the Lord.
We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and He will come. He never comes to those who do not wait.
Her sorrows went up into regions of sublimity, of which we can form only the vaguest conceptions. They went down into profound depths of the soul, which we cannot explore because they have no parallel in ourselves. They were heightened by the unappreciable perfection of her nature, by the exuberant abundance of her grace, by the exceeding beauty of Jesus, and above all by His Divinity.
It has been curiously remarked by St. Andrew Avellino that those who have a special devotion to the Passion generally die quiet and sweet deaths, as the Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Mary Magdalen did. Certainly it is remarkable that, while most of those close to Our Lord died violent deaths, the three who assisted at Calvary should have died so softly, as if already their real death had been died there.
Even a well-founded suspicion more or less degrades a man. His suspicion may be verified, and he may escape some material harm by having cherished the suspicion. But he is unavoidably the worse man in consequence of having entertained it.
I reckon failure to be the most universal unhappiness on earth. Almost everybody and everything are failures – failures in their own estimation, even if they are not so in the estimation of others. Those optimists who always think themselves successful are few in number, and they for the most part fail in this at least, namely, that they cannot persuade the rest of the world of their success.