Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

What the world needs today is neither a new order, a new education, a new system, a new society nor a new religion. The remedy lies in a mind and a heart filled with holiness.

I'm asked that a lot: 'James, is there really a continuing spiritual renaissance occurring on this planet? Look at all the conflict, look at the wars.' And I believe, yes, we're still moving toward a deeper spirituality. It's personal. It's grassroots. It's everybody trying to get their own connection made, and from there it grows out.

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit. And it's constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience.

God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It's a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.

The process of my transformation came to a head with my discovery of St. Francis of Assisi during a pilgrimage I went on with a scout troop from my school.

In the life of the spirit there is no ending that is not a beginning.

Regeneration can come only through a change of heart in the individual.

Physically, I've seen a change in my life. No, I haven't had a face lift or anything like that. I've grown. That's God's countenance.

Allah does not change social conditions until people change their attitude.

A man must himself be cleansed, before cleansing others

I look at my faith like a room, and there was all of this furniture in there, but I had inherited most of the furniture. Then, when I got divorced, I took everything out just to see how I was going to refurnish the room, and that was a very essential step in my life. It was great.

Love is the key we must turn, truth is the flame we must burn.

There is no healing a man till the law has wounded him, no making him alive till the law has slain him.

My appointed work is to awaken the divine nature that is within. This is my calling, to open doors of truth and make people think, to arouse others from their apathetic and lethargic state, and get them to seek out for themselves the inner peace which dwells within. This is the extent of my undertaking, I can do no more. The rest I leave to a higher power.

A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.

Praised be the Lord, who has redeemed me from myself.

To be honest, I didn't want to believe that Christianity could radically transform someone's character and values. It was much easier to raise doubts and manufacture outrageous objections that to consider the possibility that God actually could trigger a revolutionary turn-around in such a depraved and degenerate life.

As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values--especially the moral ones--coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.

No man ever made himself to live. No preacher, however earnest, can make one hearer to live. No parent, however prayerful, no teacher, however tearful, can make a child live unto God. “You hath HE quickened,” is true of all who are quickened.

It is only by frequent deaths of ourselves and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully.

To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth.

How good it is for us when the Lord unsettles our lukewarm and superficial lives.