Saints Quotes

“Every saint has a bee in his halo.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.”
― George Orwell

“Saints are everywhere; the reason we can’t spot them is that we now recognize them as losers.”
― Abhaidev, Notes from the Edge of Sanity

“There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia.

I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ...

Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower...

I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms.

When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.

But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.”
― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

“Try your best to be a saint and see how far you'll fall.”
― Sai Marie Johnson

“Why is it that the saints of June are honored with fire?”
― Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, 50th Anniversary Edition

“And what is England if not a farm with soil to be tilled and vines to tend?” Ned asked. “She needs a farmer to see to her needs, and nothing else will do. That’s why our patron saint shares the same name, because the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the faith.”
― Avellina Balestri, All Ye That Pass By: Book 1: Gone for a Soldier

“He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“(15) Can it be wrong at any time or place to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and to love your neighbour as yourself (Matt. 22:37, 39)?”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“I cannot pretend I am not pleased by praise; but I am more delighted to have declared the truth than to be praised for it.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“To be a saint, never miss a single opportunity among the infinite varieties of agony. [...] Competing with Jesus, the saints" excesses repeat Golgotha, adding to it the refinements oftorture gleaned from subsequent Christian centuries. Christs crown ofthorns, imitated by the saints, caused more suffering in the world than I don’t know how many incurable diseases. Jesus was, after all, the saints’ incurable disease. [...] Jesus is responsible for so much suffering. His conscience must weigh on him very heavily, since he no longer shows any signs of life. [...] I don’t know any bigger sin than that ofJesus.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

“A secret voice whispers to me incessantly that ifI were to live among saints I would need to carry a dagger. [...] How can one not hate the angels, the saints, and God, that entire band from paradise which fuels such a passionate longing for other shelters and other temptations? Heaven irritates me. In its Christian guise, it drives me to despair.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

“We can’t crucify beauty without steadily walking into hell. Every time we walk the dog we are surrounded by hints of the Kingdom of Heaven. That’s a big thought to swim into. One of the ways we can practice being saintly is to notice that grace. And the more we abide in it the more folks around us start to notice. This is one of the attributes that used to define saints; you glimpse more of the Kingdom of Heaven around them. They are literally an eye-opener. A saint has had the saliva and dirt of the great druid Yeshua wipe the blindness from their eye. They behold.”
― Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us

“Does man only possess immortality? The great words: ‘Behold, I make all things new’ are certainly related not to man only, but to all creation, to every creature. We have already said that the spirit of animals, even the smallest part of it, cannot be mortal, for it is from the Holy Spirit….In the new Jerusalem, the new universe, there will be a place for the animals, too….Eternal life for [non-human] creatures will be only quiet happiness and enjoyment of the new radiant nature full of light, in communication with man, who will no longer torture and exterminate it.”
― St Luke Of Simferopol, Spirit, Soul, Body

“The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“They say your heart breaks to let the light in, but at some point some of our hearts break so hard and so often that they’re just filled with light, which has no choice but to shine back out. Maybe saints realize that before the rest of us do, which is why they’re always pointing to their hearts. They ask us not to harden against, but open to. They speak in tongues of trinkets, flowers and beads and glitter, small innocent things that insist throughout even the darkest times—bits of bright that are the philosophers’ stone. Strung up and clung to, shapeshifting the world itself.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“O God, Thou who guidest the Saints and leadest them on Thy eternal way, who art everywhere with them and leavest them never, lead me on this way and direct my feet on the way of salvation and bring me to the place which I long for, that I may have intercourse with Thy Saints and serve Thee with them in holiness and praise Thee eternally.”
― A J and Albertus Schwengler: Wensinck, Legends of Eastern Saints Chiefly from Syriac Sources. Volume 1: Archelides; Volume 2: Hilaria. Bound with: Eusebii Pamphilii Historiae Ecclesiasticae Lib X, Ed A Schwegler.

“When a shrine, a temple, an altar room, a church, a sacred place of nature becomes legendary for a miracle by a prophet or a saint took place there; people flock there in search of the miraculous. Tell me, my child, have you found what you were in search of?”
― Dipa Sanatani, A Thousand Names

“He was showing how marriage is not a contract, involving merely an exchange of goods and services. Rather, marriage is a covenant, involving an exchange of persons. Kippley's argument was that every covenant has an act whereby the covenant is enacted and renewed; and the marital act is a covenant act. When the marriage covenant is renewed, God uses it to give new life. To renew the marital Covenant and use birth control to destroy the potential for new life is tantamount to receiving the Eucharist and spitting it on the ground.”
― Scott Hahn, Rome Sweet Home

“You don't need to be a saint to realize your sins.”
― Ezekiel Millinga, Love is Not a Feeling, It is a Choice

“I thought I could fit everything into tidy boxes and sort right from wrong. But now I see that sometimes a saint acts like a sinner. And sometimes a sinner acts like a saint.”
― Amanda Cox, The Bitter End Birding Society

“Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”
― Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul L'Histoire D'une Âme: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux: With Additional Writings and Sayings of St. Thérès

“The saint isn’t someone who makes us think, ‘That looks hard; that’s a heroic achievement of will’ - with the inevitable accompanying thought, ‘That’s too hard for me’ - but someone who makes us think, ‘How astonishing! Human lives can be like that, behaviour like that can look quite natural’ - with perhaps the thought, ‘How can I find what they have?’

(Silence and Honeycakes)”
― Rowan Williams

“The saints are the people, weak and imperfect like ourselves, who said a total "Yes" to God's love. It is not that they were strong enough or virtuous enough to win his love, because that love is always freely given, but only those we call saints actually did that blessed taking, accepting the reality of being loved with all its consequences. ~Sister Wendy's Book of Saints”
― Sister Wendy Beckett

“My daughter, if you do not feel the cross it cannot be called a cross. Be sure that under the cross you will not be lost. The demon has no strength against those souls who for My love groan under the cross.”
― Gemma Saint Galgani, Portrait of Saint Gemma, a Stigmatic

“You seek saints, you seek saintesses for your salvation! But don’t’ you know that you are the saint, you are the saintess! The help you're looking for is yourself; you are the source of helping yourself!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Crazy doesn't mean you want to conquer America or talk to the birds like Saint Francis of Assisi. Even a vegetable vendor on the street corner can show this flame of madness if he likes what he is doing.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

“My Contentment

I reject contentment:
into it, certain inexperienced saints have been seen to vanish,
in a burst of somewhat cloudy light.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ledger: Poems

“My father, the Catholic,

worries about my soul, and this worry appears to me as a vision
in the form of an email

in my inbox, a quote from St. Thérèse, the little saint
of littleness.

Perhaps, he should be worried.

I pray to no saint, and my little sacrifice for the day is to go
to work and to refrain

from picking at the dry patch of skin on
the back of my scalp and smile and smile until
5 p.m.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“There is no irony to the fact
that the abbreviation for saint

is the same as the one for street. Saints are the ground

on which we walk. And without them, we are merely falling or
floating or treading, or we are simply here,

standing with ourselves in our rooms, in our little world.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens