Joan D. Chittister

Hospitality is simply love on the loose.

— Joan D. Chittister

Find the thing that stirs your heart and make room for it

— Joan D. Chittister

Religion is pointing toward the moon

— Joan D. Chittister

Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.

— Joan D. Chittister

Life is the ability to start over again.

— Joan D. Chittister

We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is

— Joan D. Chittister

To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues.

— Joan D. Chittister

In our dreams lies our unfinished work for the world.

— Joan D. Chittister

If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak…

— Joan D. Chittister

Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what…

— Joan D. Chittister

“preoccupation with fantasies of success; exhibitionism and insatiable attention-getting maneuvers;”

— Joan D. Chittister

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long.

— Joan D. Chittister

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about…

— Joan D. Chittister

Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the…

— Joan D. Chittister

When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are…

— Joan D. Chittister

Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves. . . . Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the…

— Joan D. Chittister

Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.

— Joan D. Chittister

I have to be honest with you, it never occurred to me, as years went by, that my country would look like…

— Joan D. Chittister

Imagination begins when it' s raining too hard to go out and play and you become really absorbed in something you would…

— Joan D. Chittister

We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that…

— Joan D. Chittister

In Benedictine spirituality, work is what we do to continue what God wanted done…God goes on creating through us. Consequently a life…

— Joan D. Chittister

The vision of a culture lies in what becomes its major institutions, in what it remembers as its most impacting events, in…

— Joan D. Chittister

It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own…

— Joan D. Chittister

“We need to think again about the beauties of age, its freedom and its splendor. It is the “fresh life within” that…

— Joan D. Chittister

We may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one…

— Joan D. Chittister

“The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past or bored by them,…

— Joan D. Chittister

Hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and…

— Joan D. Chittister

For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of greatness. We call them saints when what we really…

— Joan D. Chittister

Why do people think the spiritual life demands withdrawal from the ordinary? Because they've been taught, at least by implication, that the…

— Joan D. Chittister

Contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us, as well, face…

— Joan D. Chittister

Judaism calls for us to honor the rhythm of human life, the demands of the human community around us, the call of…

— Joan D. Chittister

“The service that the whole world needs from the elders is not the service of hours spent and time put in and…

— Joan D. Chittister

“We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat…

— Joan D. Chittister

“Whatever happens to the body, what toll age takes on the physical, the spirit does not grow old. In our dreams, in…

— Joan D. Chittister

“The symbolic evidence of women’s invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even…

— Joan D. Chittister

Religious life is not going to go away. It will take a different form. Why am I so sure it's not going…

— Joan D. Chittister

“Women learn in such a system that, though they are usually tolerated in life and often loved, they are seldom respected for…

— Joan D. Chittister

“Like a great waterwheel, the liturgical year goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil…

— Joan D. Chittister

Beauty scatters the seeds of hope in us.

— Joan D. Chittister

It is not our job to work miracles, but it is our task to try.

— Joan D. Chittister