Daily Inspiration- 365 Quotes From Saints

by Wyatt North

  “The love of worldly possessions is a sort of bird line, which entangles the soul, and prevents it flying to God.”

  – St. Augustine

  Augustine wrote extensively on the dangers of the desire for wealth (not wealth itself), reminding the faithful that the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10). He emphasized the risk of losing one’s faith and godliness, the “wealth of Christians,” in pursuit of earthly riches. Having food and clothing should be enough to make a godly person content, he wrote, and famine gave the faithful the chance to grow in piety through their endurance of it and ended earthly misery for those who succumbed to it.

  “Your first task is to be dissatisfied with yourself, fight sin, and transform yourself into something better. Your second task is to put up with the trials and temptations of this world that will be brought on by the change in your life and to persevere to the very end in the midst of these things.”

  – St. Augustine

  St. Augustine is regarded by many as the first psychologist because of his belief that studying the workings of the human mind would help him understand the divine. He drew on his education in philosophy and theology and viewed emotional turmoil as evidence of the conflict between God and self. That conflict, Augustine believed, accounted for the turmoil in the world—a world in which human behavior is often at odds with the way we know we should act. Transforming ourselves and the world we live in, according to Augustine, requires humans to develop unconditional love.

  “There is a beauty of form, a dignity of language, a sublimity of diction which are, so to speak, spontaneous, and are the natural outcome of great thoughts, strong convictions, and glowing feelings. The Fathers [of the Church] often attain to this eloquence without intending to do so, without self-complacency and all unconsciously.”

  – St. Augustine

  It’s important to remember that in St. Augustine’s time, the vast majority of people were illiterate, and few had access to books. Augustine once told his congregation, “We are your books.” He knew that for most people, their only way to learn and come to understand God’s Word was through the words of preachers. In fact, he regarded the homilies he delivered as shared prayer. He spoke in plain language and often bemoaned his own shortcomings as a homilist, constantly trying to improve his effectiveness as a preacher and teacher.

  “God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.”

  – St. Augustine

  Augustine sought the answer to why God, all-powerful and good, required such suffering from his son as the price for humankind’s salvation. An all-powerful God surely had no limits in choosing a mechanism for our salvation, he reasoned, and if He deliberately chose to cause his son such suffering, could He really be merciful and good? Augustine concluded that God could have chosen differently but instead created His plan for our salvation long before the Incarnation. Blood sacrifice as the means of atoning for sin was part of God’s plan from before the Fall, and that plan was prophesied through the ages. Augustine also concluded from the Gospels that God the Son’s will was perfectly aligned with God the Father’s will, and that Jesus fully understood and accepted His sacrificial role in His Father’s plan.

  “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.”

  – St. Augustine

  From his days as a student, Augustine was preoccupied with the existence of evil. He sought the answer to what was, for him and many other theologians, a foundational question: Why does God, all-powerful and perfectly good, allow His children to suffer? He concluded initially that evil exists because God has given us free will, and it is our own decisions and actions that put us in harm’s way. Later in his life, he developed a more nuanced view that what we perceive as evil may not actually be evil, because we cannot comprehend the mind of God.

  “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

  – St. Augustine

  Augustine countered the skepticism of those who would not believe in the existence of what they could not see with evidence in the form of Old Testament prophecies of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection. He also offered as evidence the rapid spread of Christianity and the changes it brought to people’s lives and to the world around them, which he maintained could only have occurred if God were at the heart of it.

  “God has no need of your money, but the poor have. You give it to the poor, and God receives it.”

  – St. Augustine

  St. Augustine was the first to formulate a theological definition of “miraculum,” or “miracle.” He used it in a letter to a friend he was urging to accept Christianity, offering that miracles were the evidence of God’s words. He defined a miracle as “anything which appears arduous or unusual, beyond the expectation or ability of the one who marvels at it.”

  “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”

  – St. Augustine

  St. Augustine was ruthlessly candid and critical of himself in the autobiography chronicling his spiritual journey, Confessions. He thought that showing how God’s mercy had never deserted him throughout his years of sin would encourage others to change their sinful ways. He pulled no punches about his own misdeeds and foolishness so that no one would regard him as being better than he really was. In fact, he explicitly detailed the weaknesses he was still struggling with.

  “Fortitude is the disposition of soul which enables us to despise all inconveniences and the loss of things not in our power.”

  – St. Augustine

  St. Augustine was canonized by acclamation, or by consensus, and there are no credible accounts of miracles performed during his lifetime. However, several people report having been cured of addictions and vices through the intercession of St. Augustine of Hippo. Some mothers, bemoaning the poor life choices of their adult children, report their offspring mending their sinful ways after their mothers prayed to St. Augustine and his mother, St. Monica, to help them find their way back to God.

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  “He alone loves the Creator perfectly who manifests a pure love for his neighbor.”

  – St. Bede the Venerable

  Bede (673-735) was raised and educated in the Monastery of St. Paul in Jarrow, England, where he was instructed by the monks and became known as a great scholar of philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, grammar, ecclesiastical history, and theology. He was ordained as a deacon at 19 and as a priest at 30 and wrote prolifically. Except for a period of a few months spent teaching in the school of the archbishop of York, he spent his life in the monastery studying, writing, and praying. He gained acclaim for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which became the model for writing about history. Bede is also the first historian to establish the year of Christ’s birth as the year 1 A.D. He is rare for having been venerated during his own lifetime.

  “Charity is that with which no man is lost, and without which no man is saved.”

  – St. Robert Bellarmine

  Born in Italy in 1542 to a devout mother, the half-sister of Pope Marcellus II (who held the office for less than a month), Robert entered the Society of Jesus at the age of eighteen. Once ordained, he began to teach and became a renowned scholar, serving as the chair of controversial theology and later Rector at the Roman College, as the Provincial of Naples, and eventually as Cardinal. He is best known for his defense of the Church against the anti-clericals and heretics of his time and for his influence in matters of church-state relations. His was a voice of reason in opposing harsh punishment for Galileo’s support of the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun: “I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be fa
lse which is demonstrated.” St. Robert Bellarmine died in 1621, and the process of canonization was initiated five years later, but it was not completed until 1930.

  “Prayer ought to be short and pure, unless it be prolonged by the inspiration of Divine grace.”

  – St. Benedict of Nursia

  Much of what is known of the life and works of St. Benedict comes from the biography written by St. Gregory, who was born three years before the death of the man who came to be known as the father of Western monasticism. When the young Benedict, born into privilege in central Italy in 480, was sent to Rome to complete his education, he was appalled by the way his classmates pursued pleasure and vice rather than truth. Fearing for his soul, he moved to a small village but soon felt compelled to seek solitude in the mountains, where he lived as a hermit in a cave. Feeling called to the fellowship of men who shared his values, he began to build a monastery north of Naples where monks would live, pray, work, and study in a community led by an Abbott. During the Middle Ages, the Rule of St. Benedict became the norm for monastic communities.

  “There is nothing better to display the truth in an excellent light, than a clear and simple statement of facts.”

  – St. Benedict of Nursia

  In his biography of St. Benedict, St. Gregory described Benedict’s first miracle. When Benedict went to Rome to complete his education, he was accompanied by his childhood nurse, who had been his first teacher and loved him dearly, and when he fled the corruption of Rome, she went with him. In the village where they were staying, the nurse borrowed an earthenware sieve from a neighbor to clean some wheat. When she was done, she left the sieve on a table instead of returning it immediately, and it was accidentally broken in two. Benedict’s nurse was very upset, and Benedict tried to console her. He took the broken sieve into another room and prayed over it fervently, asking God for it to be made whole again. When he rose from his knees, the sieve showed no sign of ever having been broken. The villagers were so amazed that they hung the sieve over the entrance to their church as proof of Benedict’s grace and virtue.

  “He who labors as he prays lifts his heart to God with his hands.”

  – St. Benedict of Nursia

  St. Benedict’s Rule makes clear his view of work as being a means to learning and maintaining self-discipline and obedience to God. It wasn’t the type of work that mattered but rather the act of working, which prevents the idleness that can lead to sin. According to Benedict, work takes priority over everything, including prayer, because God’s grace may not touch the heart and soul of an idler. In Benedict’s time, manual labor was the lot of slaves and the low-born, but he considered it essential to being a Christian.

  “The nation doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are.”

  – St. Teresa Benedicta

  The youngest child of a large Jewish Polish family in 1891, at the age of 13 Edith Stein professed to no longer believe in God. She was an avid student of philosophy, and the autobiography of Theresa of Avila made such an impression on her that she studied Catholicism in earnest and was baptized a Catholic in 1922. Viewing scholarship as a service to God, she continued furthering her own education and teaching until the Nazis’ Aryan Law banned anyone of Jewish descent from teaching. She became a Discalced Carmelite nun in Cologne in 1933 and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. By 1938, Jews in Germany were living under a reign of terror, and the prioress of the convent had Teresa smuggled across the border to a Carmelite convent in the Netherlands. She continued her studies and her writing there and was soon joined by her sister, Rosa, who had also converted and joined the Carmelites. During the Nazi occupation of Holland, Teresa Benedicta and her sister were arrested and sent to Auschwitz, along with several other Jews who had converted to Christianity. She died in the gas chamber in 1942 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987 and canonized in 1998.

  “The want of proper examination, true contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment, is the cause of bad confessions, and of the ruin of souls.”

  – St. Benedict Joseph Labre

  St. Benedict Joseph Labre is the patron saint of unmarried men, rejects, the mentally ill and insane, beggars, hobos, and the homeless. Born in France in 1748, he was the firstborn of 18 children. He was educated by his uncle, a parish priest, and from an early age wanted nothing more than to join a religious order. However, he was rejected by the Trappists, Carthusians, and Cistercians because he was sickly, and his academic preparation was considered inadequate for religious life. Giving up his goal of ordination, he set off on a pilgrimage throughout Europe that took him from one major shrine to the next, ending his journey several years later in Rome. Although he rarely begged, he earned the name, “The Beggar of Rome,” for the years he spent living on the streets of the city and in the ruins of the Coliseum, surviving on food given to him or found in the city’s trash heaps.

  “God is so good and so merciful, that to obtain Heaven it is sufficient to ask it of Him from our hearts.”

  – St. Benedict Joseph Labre

  St. Benedict Joseph Labre was filled with love of God and for the least fortunate of humanity. He lived on what was given to him and shared the little he had with the poor. When he became severely ill toward the end of his life, he sometimes accepted a bed in a hospice for poor men rather than sleeping in the ruins of the Coliseum, as he often did. On the day of his death in 1783, he made his way to a nearby church and prayed continuously for two hours. When he collapsed, he was carried to a neighboring house, where he died. Part of the house was later converted into a chapel housing his few possessions and a life-size statue marking the spot where he drew his last breath. Within months of his death at age 35, more than 130 miraculous cures attributed to his intercession had been recorded. Proclaimed a saint by the people shortly after his death, he was beatified in 1860 and canonized in 1881.

  “I want to follow you and be like you, O my Jesus; I would rather be crucified with you than enjoy all the pleasures of this world without you.”

  – St. Bernadette Soubirous

  Millions have made the pilgrimage to Lourdes, France seeking a cure for illness or infirmity. Thousands of cures have been documented since the 14-year old St. Bernadette experienced 16 visions of the Blessed Virgin between February 11 and March 25, 1858. The first vision occurred when Bernadette, accompanied by her younger sister and a friend, was sent to gather wood. Bernadette saw a beautiful young woman above a rose bush in the grotto of Massabielle. The apparition smiled at her and made the sign of the cross with a rosary, but Bernadette’s sister and friend did not see the woman dressed in blue and white. During the girls’ next visit to the grotto three days later, Bernadette fell into a trance upon seeing the apparition again, and during the third visit, on February 15, the vision asked Bernadette to return every day for the next two weeks, a period that became known as the “holy fortnight.”

  “When you pass before a chapel and do not have time to stop for a while, tell your Guardian Angel to carry out your errand to Our Lord in the tabernacle. He will accomplish it and then still have time to catch up with you.”

  – St. Bernadette Soubirous

  During one of her visits to the grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes, young St. Bernadette was told by the apparition of the Holy Virgin to perform an act of atonement by drinking the water, washing in it, and eating the herb that grows there. Bernadette complied, and when she next returned she found that the grotto’s formerly muddy water was clear and flowing freely. A few days later, the vision told her that a chapel should be built there. But it wasn’t until the final visit, after Bernadette asked the lady’s name three times, that the vision revealed herself as the Immaculate Conception. Not everyone believed Bernadette’s accounts of her visions. Some thought she was delusional and still others thought she needed to do penance. Bernadette’s story was subjected to intense scrutiny by both Church and state officials, and by 1862 they reached the conclusion that she spoke the truth. Since the local priest comp
lied with Bernadette’s request to build a chapel at the grotto, many churches have been built in the area, including the Basilica of St. Pius X.