We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be...
The world doesn’t need what women have, it needs what women are.
My longing for truth was a single prayer.
We can do nothing ourselves; God must do it. To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone.
I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God.
Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.
The Bread that we need each day to grow in eternal life, makes of our will a docile instrument of the Divine Will; sets the Kingdom of God within us; gives us pure lips, and a pure heart with which to glorify his holy name.
Woman’s soul is present and lives more intensely in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body; whereas, with men, the body has more pronoucedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.
Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help...
There is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman.
An ‘I’ without a body is a possibility. But a body without an ‘I’ is utterly impossible.
Who can sleep on the night that God became man?
All those who seek truth, seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.
To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels – this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.
You can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief, in the power of the cross. Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart. Its precious blood is poured everywhere, soothing, healing, saving.
At some point we must plunge in to discover a greater expanse; yet when this broader horizon does appear, a new depth will open up at our point of entry.
At first, after her conversion she thought she would have to renounce all that was secular and live totally immersed in God, but then she realized that, even in the contemplative life, you cannot sever all connection with the world, that the deeper you are drawn into God, the more you must go out of yourself to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.
Appropriate environmental influences can prevent mistakes. The soul of a child is soft and impressionable. Whatever influence enters there can easily form it for a lifetime. When the facts of salvation history are introduced in early childhood and in an appropriate form, this may easily lay a foundation for a saintly life.
Once while Edith was visiting the cathedral of Frankfurt, a woman with a market basket entered and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to her, leaving as deep an impression as the university lectures.
If the mystery of the cross becomes the inner form of this science, a living energy that allows the soul to be molded by what is received from this mystery, it turns into a science of the cross. On the contrary, excessive interior preoccupation with one’s own personal concerns can develop in the course of life into a general indifference to things religious.
Those who seek the truth seek God, whether they realize it or not.