Thomas Keating Quotes

When people ask me how they can know Gods plan for their lives, I tell them the best first step is to know God.

Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not 'How am I to find God?' but 'How am I to let myself be found by him?' The question is not 'How am I to love God?' but 'How am I to let myself be loved by God?'

I was raised as a Christian but the transaction has to be made by yourself - you and God - at some point.

It's the most exciting thing to watch God work when I've asked him about something, to listen to him and watch him work. It's like this friendship, and it just grows and grows and grows and grows.

In working with people across the country and around the world, I've come to know that most of us go through times that re-route our prayer life.

I believe that some of us who were kept by God a long while before we found Him love Him better perhaps than we should have done if we had received Him directly, and we can preach better to others - we can speak more of His loving-kindness and tender mercy.

We all have to go through our own spiritual process. It is very difficult. Some people are struggling and they are in their teens. Some people are in their 50s and they're struggling. Some people go through life and die not being able to accept themselves. Tragic. But it's very individual. And it's about self-esteem.

If we're interested in spiritual things, we gradually realize that what we really need is to understand this nature that seems to be a bottomless basket, because there is no peace in it.

Mine is just a simple old human story - of one person trying, with great rigor and discipline, to comprehend her personal relationship with divinity.

At a certain point, I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity... to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules - lots of them - or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission.

I always believed in God and Christ, but I was in rebellion - trying to make my relationship with God fit into my life instead of making my life fit in with him. I was stubborn.

My belief is that I wasn't born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that.

And God is always calling me to open myself to all kinds of people that I've never thought about before and also calling me on this inward spiritual journey.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They're going outside and trying everything. They don't realize that it's right inside themselves.

My desire is to walk with God every day.

I have gone through a period of seeking to understand what or how strong or what are the connections I have to God.

At different times in my life I met God from a different point of view.

I am simply trying to struggle through life; trying to do God's bidding.

On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

I partly know why I have not led a perfect life like other believers. But I avow to my Lord, and I do not lie, that from the time when I first knew him, the love of God and the fear of him has grown in me from my youth so that I have, by the power of God, always till now kept the faith.

I talk to God every day. He's very real for me.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

I suspect I have a relationship with my religion which will seem slightly weird to people who don't understand me.

Over the years, my relationship with God has changed my life for the better - it's grown me up, given me a sense of purpose, and grounded me in my identity.