"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love--either with another human person or with God."Thomas Merton
"What can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”Professor Michael
"Those of us who have been hollering about America's descent into torture for the past nine years didn't do so because we like terrorists or secretly hope for more terror attacks. We did it because if a nation is unable to decry something as always and deeply wrong, it has tacitly accepted it as sometimes and often right. Or, as President Bush now puts it, damn right."Dahlia Lithwick
"Courage is not the absence of fear. It is feeling afraid to do something but finding the strength to do it.”Fr. Walter J. Burghardt
"It is hard for me to forgive someone who has really offended me, especially when it happens more than once. I begin to doubt the sincerity of the one who asks forgiveness for a second, third, or fourth time. But God does not keep count. God just waits for our return, without resentment or desire for revenge."Henri Nouwen
"The number of priests is not the primary issue. Leadership is, and a certain kind of leadership: American Catholicism needs priest leaders for a church of lay leaders. Without effective priestly leadership, parishes can survive, but it is unlikely that they will remain vital."Peter Steinfels
"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."Wernher von Braun
"To be a follower of Jesus means in the first place to enter by compassion into his experience, with all that it expresses of the divine and of the human. And it means in the second place to enter with him into the suffering and the hope of all human persons, making common cause with them as he does, and seeking out as he does the places of his predilection among the poor and despised and oppressed."Monika K. Hellwig
"A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility — and the morality — of the church itself."Joan Chittister
"The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew were there. Like courage, and love for people. It was a real experience to be seeing a group of people who would put their bodies between you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough that you would put your body between them and and danger."Diane Nash
"Thinking of hope as a virtue, in a world that thinks of hope as the fancy of dreamers and children, turns religion upside down. Without hope, evil is a state of life and failure is a given. With hope, no amount of failure is an excuse to despair. 'Constant has been my hope in you,' the psalmist says. 'Constant.' Whatever you regret in life, whatever you have done that you fear, put it down; hope in God, be at peace. Constantly."Joan Chittister
"Whoever is on a journey towards God goes from one beginning to another beginning. Will you be among those who dare to tell themselves: "Begin again! Leave discouragement behind! Let your soul live!"Brother Roger of Taize
"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone— we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love—either with another human person or with God."Thomas Merton
"I no longer believe that you can fix the death penalty ... I learned that the death penalty throws millions of dollars down the drain -- money that I could be putting directly into crime fighting -- while dragging victims' families through a long and tortuous process that only exacerbates their pain."James Abbott
"Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain as they are."St. Augustine
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