Great Throughts Treasury

"Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing."

"Health depends to a large extent on mental attitudes and even upon the spiritual condition of the personality."

"Most illnesses do not, as is generally thought, come like a bolt out of the blue. The ground is prepared for years, through faulty diet, intemperance, overwork, and moral conflicts, slowly eroding the subject’s vitality. And when at last the illness suddenly shows itself, it would be a most superficial medicine which treated it without going back to its remote causes, to all that I call “personal problems.” There are personal problems in every life. There are secret tragedies in every heart. “Man does not die,” a doctor has remarked. “He kills himself”... Every act of physical, psychological, or moral disobedience of God’s purpose is an act of wrong living and has its inevitable consequences."

"Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices."

"At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance."

"No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person."

"Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets."

"Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual."

"Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can."

"That is what marriage really means helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life."

"In order to really understand, we need to listen, not reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible in order to help him better explain his experience."

"I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury). "

"It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link...He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood. "

"Let us not seek to bring religion to others, but let us endeavor to live it ourselves."

"Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf. "

"Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either. "

"Many ordinary illnesses are nothing but the expression of a serious dissatisfaction with life."

"We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems, no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty, all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross. "

"The more refined and subtle our minds, the more vulnerable they are."

"God has allowed man a greater margin of liberty than the animals in his creation. It is not only the organic margin of deviation of which we have spoken, and which by its fluctuations maintains the life of the body: it is a margin of more moral disobedience which maintains, if I may put it so, his spiritual life. Viewed in this light, the moral conscience is seen to be exactly comparable with the organic sensitivity described in the works of Dr. Maurice Vernet. (see note) It is when we stray from the direction ordained by God, for his purpose, that it comes into action in order to bring us back. This coming back, which is repentance, reconciles us to God, and rekindles our spiritual life."

"Disgusted by the abuses to which it led, humanity repressed Christianity by which it had so long been dominated. Repressed, but not eliminated. Herein lies, I believe, the essence of the tragedy of modern times. The modern man lives as if Christianity were a negligible hypothesis with no relation to the concrete realities of the world and society. And yet at the bottom of his heart this man remains impregnated with Christianity, so that he lives in a state of perpetual ambivalence with regard to it."

"It is a lovely thing to have a husband and wife developing together and having the feeling of falling in love again. That is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life."

"Life, the Spirit, the person, are not substantial realities which we can hold in our hands. They cannot be docketed, analyzed, or described. They are as fleeting as a lightning flash-by the time we have seen their light and heard the rumbling that follows them they have already gone. We cannot reach the person either by means of introspection or by objective scientific study. We must therefore, seek another way of approach. And that approach must by through the Spirit."

"I have no methods; all I do is accept people as they are."

"Many of the people I see yearn for a stable spiritual life. They blame themselves, after bursts of fervor, for falling back into luke-warmness, and after victories of obedience, for backsliding into sin. In this they are doubtless right - and I blame myself for the same thing; but I must at the same time bring them to see that it is our normal human condition. There is scarcely any such thing as a stable spiritual life. In any case it is rather a Hindu than a Christian ideal - the disappearance of the person, absorbed into the great Whole."

"Nobody can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person."

"The creative power is God, the divine Word which calls first the inorganic world into existence, and then the biological world to life."

"Our spiritual life itself also presents the double aspect I have described: it is made up of intermittent creative flashes and permanent automatisms. In art, too, we find the same mixture: a work of art springs from a creative inspiration, but it can be manifested only through a technique, that is to say through acquired automatisms."

"The great adventure to which I believe the men and women et today are called is, in every field of activity, the reconciliation of technology and faith. It is an immense task, simply because they have for so long he?s kept apart. In the face of all the problems which our civilization has raised, but not been able to solve, people are beginning to realize that scientific study . . . is not of itself sufficient. There is no question of sidestepping scientific stud)', but of giving it new inspiration ..,. Only those who are prepared to take the risks because of their faith, will make any real contribution to the building of a new civilization."

"The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self-justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God."

"The real meaning of travel, like that of a conversation by the fireside, is the discovery of oneself through contact with other people, and its condition is self-commitment in the dialogue."

"The progress of our spiritual life is made up of these kinds of successive discoveries, in which we perceive that we have turned away from God instead of going towards him. That is what makes a great saint like St. Francis of Assisi declares himself chief among sinners."

"This spiritual life, in its characteristic sudden creative welling up, is therefore entirely subjective, inexpressible, and also inter?mittent. It is not manifested in the order of objectively observable phenomena except by its fruits."

"The same problem crops up throughout the whole field of medicine. From Hippocrates onwards, doctors have always been passionately interested in these psycho-physical concordances, without any satisfactory explanation to them, from the purely scientific point of view, having been found. Kretschmer has shown the concordance between certain types of physique and a predisposition to certain mental diseases. And I might add that even without having made a study of physiognomy, we all judge from a cursory glance at our neighbor's face whether he is an anxious type or a contented one, profound or superficial. Does the mind mold the body, or is it the body which determines the mind?"

"Those old Greek gods are not just poetry and legend. In them the Ancients personified living realities -- intelligence, beauty, love, or lust, which are still at work in our hearts, and which fashion our persons. The language they speak is that of image and myth, which touches the person much more directly than the explicit language of science and the intellectual dialectic of the modern world. It is also the language of the Bible, of the parables of Christ, which the rationalist of today finds it so difficult to understand, of the Word of God which demands of us not a discussion but a personal decision."

"Thus God's plan for our spiritual life is realized, as in the life of the body, in a succession of corrections of our deviations. We sense great uneasiness when we recognize that we are not what we thought we were or wanted to be - such moments are so many decisive stages of our spiritual life: we are forced to our knees, and there find once more, through God's grace and forgiveness, harmony with him and with ourselves. Even complete sincerity at such moments, is an unattainable ideal. But what is attainable is the periodic movement of sincerity, the movement, in fact, when we confess that we are not as we have sought to appear; and it is at those moments that we find contact with God once more."

"This is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible beings who do not run away from life."

"The religious life itself is no different in this respect. Point by point we shall find in it all the features we have noted above with regard to life: the incessant fluctuations, regulations and sensitivity, the elusive and intermittent character of that which is specifically living and creative, and lastly the automatisms which prolong it, and which are at one and the same time its witnesses, its support and its womb."

"To be right is dangerous, it has ever been the source of all intolerance."

"Thus, in the spiritual life too, automatisms, the necessary servants of life, are at the same time its tomb. These habits of piety, indispensable as I have shown them to be, can very quickly become emptied of their truly creative substance, to become nothing more than the cloak of a devout personage. There are bigoted stick-in-the-muds in every church. In a pious family it is easy to mistake for a living faith what is in reality only a system of rigid principles which imprison life."

"To be sure, a fruit is a living thing. At the moment when the breath of the Spirit blows, all these qualities enumerated by the apostle well up like a spring of fresh water. But, inevitably, they gradually crystallize into new automatisms, and form a new' personage. Thus piety is manifested in all the habits which go to make up this personage: regular prayer, confession, Bible reading, the Church with all its rites and ceremonies. (He who, on a plea of preserving spontaneity, refuses to submit to any religious discipline, will find his piety becoming extinguished, just as we were unable to grasp life apart from the automatic living phenomena of the body and the mind, so we cannot conceive of spiritual life detached from all concrete and regular expression."

"Without the invisible conductor the astonishing correlation which exists between the organic facts and the psychical facts remains an impenetrable mystery. For example, I am sad - that is a psychical sign - and I weep - which is a physical sign. On what does the correlation between these two signs rest? I may think, with certain doctors, that I weep because I am sad. But that leaves the mechanism unexplained; why does my sadness provoke secretion in my lachrymal glands rather than the contraction of my big toe? I may think, with other doctors, that I experience the sensation of sadness because my lachrymal glands are secreting tears - and of course, because at the same time all sorts of other mechanisms are at work in my vegetative nervous system. But in this case there is no explanation of why these nervous phenomena are accompanied by a feeling of sadness rather than joy."

"We do not possess God. We find him periodically."